Designing Groupwork

Chapter 1 in Elizabeth Cohen's Designing Groupwork discussed how groupwork is used as a strategy in a classroom and some of its key features, which are allowing students to make their own mistakes and have delegated authority and members need to rely on each other to complete the task at hand.  The chapter also briefly introduces the advantages of groupwork in the classroom - face-to-face interaction (reduces misbehavior), everyone participates because students care about their evaluation by other members, and peer assistance.  Finally, the author points out that with all of the research and published literature that has been done, several theories about groupwork have emerged and that they can be applied to a variety of educational settings.  I'm curious, however, about what these theories are, and how effective they are when they are applied to a secondary school setting, as most of the research that the author has done has been at the elementary school level.

In chapter 2, it showed how effective groupwork is as a technique, as it helps students achieve certain intellectual and social goals and it helps solve two classroom problems that commonly plague teachers.  The intellectual goals that are accomplished with groupwork include helping students with explaining and learning new concepts (conceptual learning), creative problem solving, helping students develop those critical higher order thinking skills, increasing and improving one's basic skills, and improving oral proficiency - no matter what the task is, no matter what the students disagree about, every student learns and develops these crucial intellectual skills in an interactive manner.  The social goals that are accomplished with groupwork are establishing positive intergroup relations and socializing students for adult roles, the skills that are necessary for students to be successful in the adult world.  Finally, the two common classroom problems that groupwork helps alleviate are with the low-achieving student who is often off-task and allows the teacher to maintain control over the classroom while she is working with one group of students - the rest of the class knows what they should be doing, so there is some type of control that exists within the classroom.  This reading has made me realize why I had an easier time in student teaching when I assigned my students to make their own propaganda poster.  They knew what to do, they had accessible materials, they had models, and they were all allowed to express their thoughts in a different, creative way.

In chapter 3, Cohen describes the dilemma, someone usually takes charge of the group and the rest of the group members agree, and the causes of this dilemma in groupwork.  She attributes that this behavior exists because groups will achieve a hierarchy, or a status ordering, that is based on four different statuses, which are expert status (everyone relies on the group member who is the expert of the subject or topic), academic status (everyone relies on the group member with the highest grade or with the highest ability, even if that ability does not relate to the task), peer status, and societal status.  The author then explains that with these status orderings comes expectations that hierarchical members follow, which results in a self-fulfilling prophecy and a continuation of high status members dominating the group and low status members not becoming involved.  However, even though groups can be used to combat these prejudices, if the teacher does not properly make use of grouping strategies and recognizes these inequalities, then groupwork will do nothing more than to further these inequalities. I am curious to know if there are any other solutions, other than heterogenous grouping, to this dilemma, and if so, what they are and how effective they are.