This is the fourth post in a series on how I approach the work of teaching. If you missed the first, second, or third post, check them out at their links.
Here’s one big way I experimented with my lesson planning so far this year: group work. Teachers know that group work is not easy to implement and requires a lot of planning and up-front work to invest students and draw them in. For the non-teachers: think about what having group work in a classroom means. Imagine 30+ people in a room the size of your living room all trying to get a task done at the same time. Now think about the fact that everyone in the room is a teenager — there are copious opportunities for kids to get off task, gossip, throw things, visit with other kids who are not in their group, mill about the room, and do anything other than complete the work.* Think about how hard it is to wrangle 30+ adults at a meeting or party and get them all to settle down and listen to an announcement. Now try it with kids.
Group work in a remote setting poses a unique set of challenges. First and most obvious — the kids cannot physically work together. For math, this also means that kids cannot share the math work they do with each other, at least not in the usual pencil and paper sense. Kids can’t reach over and grab a partner’s paper to compare strategies or make sense of the problem if they’re stuck. My school uses Zoom, but no matter what platform you use, one of the only viable options to allow for remote group work is breakout rooms.
Breakout rooms are their own beast. Students are left to their own devices with other students and no adult supervision while online.** In spring 2020 when I first went remote — my school did not allow breakout rooms, with few exceptions. Luckily my school reversed course on this policy for the 20–21 school year, and many teachers have decided to use breakout rooms with thoughtful and intentional planning. Because of the complexities of inevitably leaving many children unsupervised in a virtual setting, one of the first things I considered when planning for group work was how to frame the purpose of group work to kids in a compelling way and the guidelines around what effective collaboration looked like. The norms I presented to students were generally the same as ones I would present to students in-person, and kids seemed bought in to the idea of being able to work with others and not just independently.
I put the kids in groups of three. What I did not anticipate when I first started planning for group work was how tough it was to get kids to actually talk to each other in the breakout rooms. My hurdle wasn’t kids socializing and getting off task, it was silence. It was common for me to pop into a group, see one student try to get the conversation started by sharing what they got for a part of the problem or asking a question, and then see the other two students in the group totally leave that person hanging for minutes before putting a one-word response in the chat, if that. Kids couldn’t rely on nonverbal cues like nodding along or body language. They had to learn to communicate verbally, and often. ln some groups I joined, students had probably been completely silent during the entire span of work time. Honestly, I would rather have had students socializing and off task because at least that would provide them with some social stimulus to ward off isolation during the pandemic. Interestingly, I could see on the classwork platform I used to monitor student work that students were still independently trying to complete the work but getting stuck, even though they could have been utilizing each other to get further in the problem.
Another challenge I did not anticipate was the tech issues. Several kids would inevitably lose connection while transitioning from the main zoom room to the breakout rooms, and it would take a couple minutes to actually get every kid with their group. Students with poor internet connections would barely be able to speak and engage while in their breakout rooms. I could only spend time with 2–3 groups out of 10 during a 15-minute work span if I wanted to make real progress coaching a group on their communication while they worked together. All this while simultaneously monitoring every student’s work to inform decisions about what the whole-class discussion would look like when kids returned. As the teacher, a big challenge for me was how much longer checking in with individual groups took remotely compared to in the classroom.
Based on these challenges, I refined group work days to focus on peer to peer communication rather than deep practice with the mathematical concepts of the lesson. Typically, I planned for group work days to occur after students had already learned and practiced a new skill. The task would be a culminating problem that involved the use of the new skill kids had learned with added complexity coming from higher analytical reasoning demands. These problems required kids to sift through a greater volume of given information. Kids would also need to determine what information was missing and how to calculate it. I added in scaffolds meant to support kids in their communication with each other. For example, I added a warm-up on group work days where kids took a few minutes with their groups to first say hi and decide how they wanted to work together before jumping right into the problem. Kids could choose to begin by working for a few minutes independently, then coming back and discussing; reading the problem together and working through each part step-by-step; a combination of both, or any other process kids decided on. The end of class reflection was an open-ended question that asked students to reflect on how their group communicated and how they could improve in the future. After a few attempts with this structure, I realized that even this level of guidance and specificity was not enough to support all kids in communicating with each other.
The most success I’ve seen with breakout rooms and group work at my school was from one of my coworkers. He created discussion groups of four and was extremely specific (there was no detail unaccounted for) about how kids should engage while in the group. For example, not only did he specify the order in which kids should speak (alphabetically by first name), but also the contribution everyone should make (e.g., the first person would share an initial idea, the next person would agree or disagree before sharing their own idea, and so on. The last person during one round had the additional challenge of posing a new question to the group). Then, he created a survey to administer to students at the end of class asking if they spoke, if everyone in the group spoke, and what they learned from the discussion. The first two questions were multiple choice instead of open-ended. All the questions were simple enough so that they would be easy for students to answer and not opt out. The survey provided both an important closing reflection opportunity for kids, and clearer insight into each group’s dynamics and levels of engagement for the teacher. This is key in the remote world when the teacher cannot physically observe every group.
Where am I at with group work now? There is still a lot of silence. However, there are more pockets of interaction. When kids successfully work together to solve a problem, I’ve noticed a sense of satisfaction from them that’s different from the satisfaction of figuring a problem out independently. Not only were students satisfied because they solved a more difficult problem, but also students were satisfied when they were able to explain their thinking so that everyone in the group understood. That might make the effort involved with planning for group work worthwhile, but it’s tough to tell. Some kids hate group work because their group is too silent. At the very least, the experience of stretching myself with new structures for learning has been worthwhile and interesting.
*Yes, all of this has happened to me at some point.
**At other schools, students have gotten naked while in breakout rooms or shared other inappropriate content.
