Reading-Class connections

In reading “Collaborative problem-solving in mixed language groups,” I was immediately reminded of my students and a conversation I had with my CT. Even though we do have a student who speaks a language other than English at home, the piece of this article that stood out to me more than the ESL piece was the small group interactions. This Wednesday, as a part of a fire safety lesson, we divided the students into groups of three. Pictures of different objects or situation were shown on the overhead and groups were asked to work together to come up with a safety rule related to each picture. Since we have many natural leaders in our class we ran into the problems of students butting heads with other natural leaders in their group; dominating the entire activity; and/or failing to include one member. Our ESL student happened to been in a group consisting of two natural leaders. Near the end of the lesson time, this student approached me reporting that his group was not including him. I joined the group to see what was going on and observed one student writing and drawing as the other student spouted off ideas. I asked why they were not including M and they said they couldn’t hear him. I then suggested that the students take turns writing so that everyone can be involved.
After school my CT and I talked about this. She mentioned how she has heard it said that you should have the same number of jobs within a group as there are students in the group. We tried to brainstorm some ideas, but could only settle on the recorder and reporter rolls. This article seemed to support my CT’s suggestion. In the article it mentioned that the students who improved the most on their math assessment were the ones who had engaged in the discussion and problem-solving process during the collaborative math activity. As an act to engage those students seemed uninterested and scored poorly, the article suggested that you assign jobs such as recorder, checker, summarizer, and materials manager. I know working in groups will be beneficial for my students especially in math, if not academically then surly it will benefit them socially. For future groups, however I will certainly structure it more by making sure each member has a job within the group.