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How to Create a Stimulating Learning Environment

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How to Create a Stimulating Learning Environment

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How to Create a Stimulating Learning… • TutorCruncher

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Our environments can have a huge impact on how we learn. If your tutoring agency offices are cramped and cluttered, the chances are that your students won’t be…

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Best Ways to Increase Student Participation

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Best Ways to Increase Student Participation

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Top 12 Ways to Increase Student Participation - TeachHUB

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Every teacher has experienced it: students that don't contribute. Engage even the most reluctant kids with our top 12 ways to increase student participation

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Implementing Group Work in the Classroom

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Implementing Group Work in the Classroom

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Implementing Group Work in the Classroom | Centre for Teaching Excellence

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Group work can be an effective method to motivate students, encourage active learning, and develop key critical-thinking, communication, and decision-making sk

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1. Bruce Tuckman's Model of Team Stages
The Bruce Tuckman theory was created in 1965, and has been applied in countless organizations and scenarios. With four main stages titled forming, storming, norming, and performing; this theory is commonly referred to as the origin for successful team building.

2. Belbin's Theory of team roles
Belbin created a list of nine roles that every team should have. These roles are Plant, Resource investigator, Coordinator, Shaper, Monitor Evaluator, Team Worker, Implementer, Completer-Finisher, and Specialist.

3. Hierarchy of Needs theory by Abraham Maslow
Maslow created a pyramid of the motivation in humans. The bottom starts off with Physiological items like food. The next section is Safety like the security of health. The third section is Love/belonging and an example would be family. The fourth is Esteem, meaning something like respect by others. The final section is Self-actualization and an example of this is morality.

4. Isabel Briggs-Myers and her MBTI theory
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality test that perceives how people perceive the world. This is good for teamwork because it can help the team understand each other better.

5. John Adair's Leadership theory
This theory is a perfect model for what leadership and management should look like.

6. Carl Jung's Color theory
Jung's theory is about how color is a determinant of human behavior. By understanding this, you can better understand why people in your team do what they do.

7. Tajfel's theory on Social Identity
This theory presented the idea of social identity as a great way to describe inter-group behavior.

8. X and Y theory developed by Douglas McGregor
The X and Y theory is a description of how humans are motivated. This is also one of the most important theories that managers and employees should be familiar with.

9. Strength Theory
This idea is that if for the best teamwork you have to continually work at it and become strong, like a muscle.

10. Team Analysis Theory
This theory is that eventually your team will fall apart, so you will need to re-evaluate the situation and analyze what went wrong.

By a keen understanding of these teamwork theories, you will be able to get the most out of a group of people. Whether this is for a manager trying to create team unity, or a sports team looking for teamwork, these theories are perfect for your objective.

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The Different Theories About Teamwork And Teambuilding

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1. Bruce Tuckman's Model of Team Stages The Bruce Tuckman theory was created in 1965, and has been applied in countless organizations and scenarios. With four main stages titled forming, storming, norming, and performing; this theory is commonly referred to as the origin for successful team building. 2.

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Released in 1965, the theory, also known as Tuckman's stages, were made widely known to the intellectual community and contained four stages (later five) that would define the basic functions of a team in progress.

A Brief Analysis of Tuckman's Stages

The four original stages of Tuckman's model of group behavior were forming, storming, norming, and performing, with adjourning being added twelve years in later.

The stage of forming takes place when team or group members first meet one another. Tuckman explains how group members will explicitly attempt to avoid conflict in fear of giving off a bad first impression. According to Tuckman, very little work on the project at hand gets completed during this stage. This stage is more important for becoming acquainted and learning to work together.

The second stage is known as storming. There is a double-edged definition within storming because not only does brainstorming of different individuals' ideas take place but the disagreements and arguments regarding these ideas also happen. Tuckman explains that this stage is a test of group members' maturity and ability to compromise with others' opposing ideas, two major necessities when in a team setting.

The third stage is norming, probably the most simple of the five stages. Norming takes place when storming completes and the group is ready to move forward with assigning roles and beginning physical production of work.

The fourth stage, performing, happens when the group or team begins to work as one cohesive unit in an efficient and productive manner. There is very little argument or hesitation; the project closes in on completion as the individual members become properly synchronized within their roles.

The final stage, added in 1977, is adjourning, which basically explains the process of letting go of one's role in the team and the attachments they have made.

Contrasting Tuckman's Stages with the Tannenbaum and Schmidt Continuum

Bruce Tuckman's stages of group dynamics is not the only highly regarded theory defining group functions. The Tannenbaum and Schmidt Continuum talks about managerial and team roles and how much power the manager gives the employees to make decisions.

Basically, the manager can give more or less power to their team. If too little power is given to the employees, then the rest of the team may not function properly. If more power is given to employees and something goes wrong, the manager will be forced to take the blame, not for the project's failure but rather for giving his team the kind of power he/she did.

Unlike Bruce Tuckman's theory, Tannenbaum and Schmidt focused more on the manager as the primary role and what would potentially happen to the manager in these situations. On the other hand, Tuckman wanted to focus on the entire team as a cohesive unit. While compromise is a major contributor to the Tuckman theory, the Tannenbaum and Schmidt Continuum emphasizes the leader as the only decision-maker of the group; the team is merely just there for ideas and contributions.

Overall, Tuckman's Stages is a much more balanced group effort, while the Tannenbaum and Schmidt Continuum is what one would find in a current corporation's business meeting.

You might also read about other teamwork theories not mentioned here.

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Bruce Tuckman, currently a psychology professor at Ohio State University, is one of the most influential thinkers in modern history. His research has spanned over fifty years, and his dissertations regarding the functions of a small group are revolutionary. Released in 1965, the theory, also known as Tuckman's stages, were made widely known to the ...

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Teaching Group Work: Building Student Collaboration and Agency

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A 5-step action plan to build each employee's accountability

Step one: Meet with employees individually to clearly outline their role and responsibilities. Discuss the behaviours, tasks, skills, and outputs that their role encompasses, so they have a clear picture of how to embody it.

Step two: Once everyone's roles are clear, look at the upcoming team initiatives with each employee and find opportunities for them to leverage and improve their strengths. Set clear, measurable goals with your employees so there's a common understanding of what's expected of them.

Step three: Have regular, structured one-on-ones with employees to monitor their progress, give constructive feedback, and revisit their goals - remind them that goals can shift alongside the team's context and priorities.

Step four: If you see a team members' productivity dropping, meet with them to get to the root of the issue. Is their workload too much? Are they misaligned with their peers? Help guide them to solutions by asking meaningful questions.

Step five: Likewise, when an employee drops the ball or makes a mistake, be compassionate and guide them through the learning process, rather than telling them what they did wrong or reprimanding them.

Building employee accountability will help your team become more collectively accountable, but there are things you can do as a manager to foster a culture of accountability, too!

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Promote accountability to drive team performance

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Step one: Meet with employees individually to clearly outline their role and responsibilities. Discuss the behaviours, tasks, skills, and outputs that their role encompasses, so they have a clear picture of how to embody it. Step two: Once everyone's roles are clear, look at the upcoming team initiatives with each employee and find opportunities for them to leverage and improve their strengths.

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Truly collaborative group work is complex and messy, so we have a few tips and tools to get students working interdependently.

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Mention group work and you're confronted with pointed questions and criticisms. The big problems, according to our audience: One or two students do all the work; it can be hard on introverts; and grading the group isn't fair to the individuals.

But the research suggests that a certain amount of group work is beneficial.

"The most effective creative process alternates between time in groups, collaboration, interaction, and conversation... [and] times of solitude, where something different happens cognitively in your brain," says Dr. Keith Sawyer, a researcher on creativity and collaboration, and author of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration.

So we looked through our archives and reached out to educators on Facebook to find out what solutions they've come up with for these common problems.

Making Sure Everyone Participates

"How many times have we put students in groups only to watch them interact with their laptops instead of each other? Or complain about a lazy teammate?" asks Mary Burns, a former French, Latin, and English middle and high school teacher who now offers professional development in technology integration.

Unequal participation is perhaps the most common complaint about group work. Still, a review of Edutopia's archives-and the tens of thousands of insights we receive in comments and reactions to our articles-revealed a handful of practices that educators use to promote equal participation. These involve setting out clear expectations for group work, increasing accountability among participants, and nurturing a productive group work dynamic.

Norms: At Aptos Middle School in San Francisco, the first step for group work is establishing group norms. Taji Allen-Sanchez, a sixth- and seventh-grade science teacher, lists expectations on the whiteboard, such as "everyone contributes" and "help others do things for themselves."

For ambitious projects, Mikel Grady Jones, a high school math teacher in Houston, takes it a step further, asking her students to sign a group contract in which they agree on how they'll divide the tasks and on expectations like "we all promise to do our work on time." Heather Wolpert-Gawron, an English middle school teacher in Los Angeles, suggests creating a classroom contract with your students at the start of the year, so that agreed-upon norms can be referenced each time a new group activity begins.

Group size: It's a simple fix, but the size of the groups can help establish the right dynamics. Generally, smaller groups are better because students can't get away with hiding while the work is completed by others.

"When there is less room to hide, nonparticipation is more difficult," says Burns. She recommends groups of four to five students, while Brande Tucker Arthur, a 10th-grade biology teacher in Lynchburg, Virginia, recommends even smaller groups of two or three students.

Meaningful roles: Roles can play an important part in keeping students accountable, but not all roles are helpful. A role like materials manager, for example, won't actively engage a student in contributing to a group problem; the roles must be both meaningful and interdependent.

At University Park Campus School, a grade 7-12 school in Worcester, Massachusetts, students take on highly interdependent roles like summarizer, questioner, and clarifier. In an ongoing project, the questioner asks probing questions about the problem and suggests a few ideas on how to solve it, while the clarifier attempts to clear up any confusion, restates the problem, and selects a possible strategy the group will use as they move forward.
Courtesy of University Park Campus School
At Design 39, a K-8 school in San Diego, groups and roles are assigned randomly using Random Team Generator, but ClassDojo, Team Shake, and drawing students' names from a container can also do the trick. In a practice called vertical learning, Design 39 students conduct group work publicly, writing out their thought processes on whiteboards to facilitate group feedback. The combination of randomizing teams and public sharing exposes students to a range of problem-solving approaches, gets them more comfortable with making mistakes, promotes teamwork, and allows kids to utilize different skill sets during each project.

Rich tasks: Making sure that a project is challenging and compelling is critical. A rich task is a problem that has multiple pathways to the solution and that one person would have difficulty solving on their own.

In an eighth-grade math class at Design 39, one recent rich task explored the concept of how monetary investments grow: Groups were tasked with solving exponential growth problems using simple and compound interest rates.

Rich tasks are not just for math class. When Dan St. Louis, the principal of University Park, was a teacher, he asked his English students to come up with a group definition of the word Orwellian. They did this through the jigsaw method, a type of grouping strategy that John Hattie's study Visible Learning ranked as highly effective.

"Five groups of five students might each read a different news article about the modern world," says St. Louis. "Then each student would join a new group of five where they need to explain their previous group's article to each other and make connections to each. Using these connections, the group must then construct a definition of the word Orwellian." For another example of the jigsaw approach, see this video from Cult of Pedagogy.

Supporting Introverts

Teachers worry about the impact of group work on introverts. Some of our educators suggest that giving introverts choice in who they're grouped with can help them feel more comfortable.

"Even the quietest students are usually comfortable and confident when they are with peers with whom they connect," says Shelly Kunkle, a veteran teacher at Wasawee Middle School in North Webster, Indiana. Wolpert-Gawron asks her students to list four peers they want to work with and then makes sure to pair them with one from their list.

Having defined roles within groups-like clarifier or questioner-also provides structure for students who may be less comfortable within complex social dynamics, and ensures that introverts don't get overshadowed by their more extroverted peers.

Finally, be mindful that introverted students often simply need time to recharge. "Many introverts do not mind and even enjoy interacting in groups as long as they get some quiet time and solitude to recharge. It's not about being shy or feeling unsafe in a large group," says Barb Larochelle, a recently retired high school English teacher in Edmonton, Alberta, who taught for 29 years.

"I planned classes with some time to work quietly alone, some time to interact in smaller groups or as a whole class, and some time to get up and move around a little. A whole class of any one of those is going to be hard on one group, but a balance works well."

Assessing Group Work

Grading group work is problematic. Often, you don't have a clear understanding of what each student knows, and a single student's lack of effort can torpedo the group grade. To some degree, strategies that assign meaningful roles or that require public presentations from groups provide a window in to each student's knowledge and contributions.

But not all classwork needs to be graded. Suzanna Kruger, a high school science teacher in Seaside, Oregon, doesn't grade group work-there are plenty of individual assignments that receive grades, and plenty of other opportunities for formative assessment.

John McCarthy, a former high school English and social studies teacher and current education consultant and adjunct professor at Madonna University for the graduate department for education, suggests using group presentations or group products as a non-graded review for a test. But if you want to grade group work, he recommends making all academic assessments within group work individual assessments. For example, instead of grading a group presentation, McCarthy grades each student on an essay, which the students then use to create their group presentation.

Laura Moffit, a fifth-grade teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina, uses self and peer evaluations to shed light on how each student is contributing to group work-starting with a lesson on how to do an objective evaluation. "Just have students circle :), :|, or :( on three to five statements about each partner, anonymously," Moffit commented on Facebook. "Then give the evaluations back to each group member. Finding out what people really think of your performance is a wake-up call."

And Ted Malefyt, a middle school science teacher in Hamilton, Michigan, carries a clipboard with the class list formatted in a spreadsheet and walks around checking in on students while they do group work.

"Using this spreadsheet, you have your own record of which student is meeting your expectations and who needs extra help," explains Malefyt. "As formative assessment takes place, quickly document with simple checkmarks."

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Educators weigh in on solutions to the common pitfalls of group work.

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3 Steps to Ensure Support in the Classroom

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3 Steps to Ensure Support in the Classroom

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1. Define Expectations
Before each assignment establish guidelines. Putting guidelines in place will help assist students in knowing what is expected of them.
Students will understand what types of behaviors are expected of them throughout the assignments. This will also let teachers be more available for students.
2. Be Available
Create an a safe and comfortable learning environment for students. This will allow students to feel comfortable talking with the teacher. As a teacher make yourself available to your students so they feel like they can talk to you about all their learning needs.
3. Peer Reviews & Feedback
Peer Reviews and Feedback allow students to give honest reviews about their group partners as well on the assignment itself. This can help the teacher adjust for the next group assignments as well as knowing how the class is doing within the groups. Based on this review classrooms can be adjusted to work better.