Description: For this type of group, students are divided into groups at the beginning of the term. When you want to incorporate small group discussion or teamwork into your class, you direct the students to get into these term-long learning groups. Groups of four work well, because each foursome can be subdivided into pairs, depending on the activity.
- Class Size: Any
- Time Frame: Any
- Setting: No limitations
- Modality: Face-to-Face, Hybrid, Online
Comments: Students get to know a small number of their classmates well over the course of the term, and may come to see their team-mates as study partners even outside the classroom. Using learning teams eliminates the time it takes to organize students into groups each time you wish to use group work. However, because students will be working with each other over an extended time period, be very careful about how you assign them to groups. Have students submit data cards about themselves at the beginning of term, possibly even completing a short personality inventory. You might want to ask them also to suggest the names of two or three classmates with whom they would and would not like to work.
Group Work in the Classroom: Types of Small Groups. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo.
Forming Groups in a Large Class
So how do you form groups in your large class? If you have a group of 100 students, and you want to break them into groups of five how can this be accomplished?
Create five sets of cue cards. Make sure each set has 20 cards. Label them with a number from 1-20 consecutively. Do this for all five sets. Shuffle the cards up before class. Hand them out to students as they come into class. Quickly place 20 sheets of paper on desks around the room with the numbers 1-20 on the sheets. These will be used to gather the groups together. Ask all the students with a “1” to gather around the number one sheet. All those with a “2” around a number 2 sheet.
Because this is a large class, all the bodies moving around may seem quite hectic. Students will be hovering over other students for a few moments until the groups are formed. One thing to keep in mind with group work in large classes, is that you may want to form groups once and then have students work in those groups throughout the semester. Having students form new groups each class can be hectic and time consuming. If you ask students to remember their group, then they can spend more time on task and less time forming groups.
As part of the group task, ask that students email you with the members of your group. Ask only one member of the group to email you. This process will populate your inbox with 20 emails, but that is still better than 100 emails. You now have a record of the groups in case the students forget. You can save the email in your inbox and utilize your email search feature to look up names of students if needed. You can also create a list of the groups and post them via the LMS or your course website.
You can also consider forming groups outside of class. You can utilize the choice tool in Moodle and have your students pick groups. Just make sure you set a maximum for each group. Now when you come to class, and initiate groups the only logistics you have to worry about are telling students which area of the room to form groups in.