How To Guide Students For Group Work

Students have been isolated for too long during the pandemic. Social interaction has been a hindrance so much that now they can’t socialize normally as they used to beg them. Although LMS advantages are useful in the life of a student, we have realized that now after utilizing digital platforms perfectly, offline classes have their gestures and learning procedures.

Students can solve a lot of problems when they learn to collaborate and form a user group, each member contributing fruitfully. This is one of the reasons why project works are very popular in a classroom, and teachers have to assign one or two project work every semester to observe how well they can communicate with other students in a class, and collaborate with them.

In a learning environment, and even outside the learning environment, students have to use communication skills to access and come up with solutions to real-life situations.

When they work in groups, these strategy developments are put into use.

Plan beforehand

Before you assign a group study or group work, do your homework and understand what you should be expecting from your students. This is so that you can plan a task as per your expectations. Here are the following things that you could ask your students to do;

• Allow them to question the task assigned so that there is clarity in thought. For example, if you have assigned an enterprise resource project work, besides ERP full form they might want to know the types of companies they should write about.
• Provide meaningful feedback on how they would like to work together come up with whom, and under what circumstances.
• Justify the reason why they cannot participate in the group work, with proper reasoning, and try to solve their problems by being guiding support.
• Provide critical analysis of how the other group members are trying to work, and how you would want things to work out differently. Teachers can also help out their students in some decision-making, and organizing work since real-life advantages are unfamiliar to them, and they’re used to LMS advantages only.

It takes great skill to arrange students who will workout together because not everyone learning dynamics match. However, proper planning and discussion with the classroom can solve all such problems.

Implementation process

To properly implement your plans, well corresponding with the progress plans of your students, you might want to display that you have taken into account the feedback provided by your students. This way, your actions carry more weight and students take a greater interest in taking a part in Group activities.

Group activities can be chaotic. Students talk over one another, have communication problems because not every school is following a complete offline procedure and is functioning with hybrid learning. Allow students to hold group discussions while your class is going on, this gives them enough time to go through things without stressing about the extra time that they would have to take out for such meetings. After all, these group discussions are a part of your class plans.

Grading

A lot of schools follow an unfair grading system where only an average score is provided for the entire team, without noticing the individual effort that has been put into it. You can encourage your students a lot by observing their inputs into the group work, and criticizing each equally. 

You should try to keep the negative marking minimum because they need to relax and think about learning how to participate in a group project better. If they are demotivated with negative marks in the very first project, there are chances that they would find the task overburdening, and not collaborate with other classmates as much.

Complete class involvement

Instead of announcing the result of every group individually, you might want to discuss the shortcomings and achievements of every group openly so that everyone can learn from the corresponding groups. When the entire class is involved, you achieve your goal of establishing total collaboration and synchronization among students to solve problems by providing meaningful inputs.

Moreover, during complete class involvement, there is a positive idea in every student to give their views. This is not because they want good grades, they feel like they are doing the most in a group. It is out of sheer interest that groups communicate with one another during such discussions. This encouragement is all they need to put in official project work also.