STIC:Group work roles workshop

Group work roles workshop

Daniel K. Schneider, TECFA, Faculty of psychology and educational sciences, University of Geneva

Workshop notes

Master in Innovation, Human Development, and Sustainability

Geneva, July, 2017

Objectives

Background

• Group work leads to better results when participants are given roles for which they will be held accountable. In addition group work should be driven by scenarios, i.e. activities that engage participants in tasks where they use tools and resources and produce outcomes. Degree of such "scaffolding" can vary according to learning goals and teaching philosophy.

• Physical visualizations (or physicalizations) can promote cognition through a variety of mechanisms, notably easier perception, hands-on manipulation and enhanced interaction with other participants. We can distinguish several types of physical visualizations, according to three dimensions: active/passive, kit/whole, digitally enhanced/non digital. In this workshop we will focus on creating a simple set of tokens useful for group animation.

• Construction kits allow creating and manipulating visualizations from building blocks. In education, construction kits, also known as expressive media or manipulatives, allow interactive exploration of designs, concepts and roles.

In this workshop we will:

• shortly discuss why assigning roles to group workers can be beneficial
• shortly discuss why physical tokens are better than simple verbal instructions
• make you think about future "outreach" activities to plan within your project
• have you create a paper (or other) prototype to organize group work

Group work roles

Roles for group work are defined in many contexts. In education, there are two different sorts of roles.

1. Most pedagogies rather focus on managerial roles, i.e. give a specific management task to each or some group member(s). All team members will contribute to all or most parts of the project.
2. Some pedagogies (typically technical development) identify specialist roles, i.e. organise the group as a multi-disciplinary team where each team member contributes to a part of the project.

In this workshop we will focus on the first case, although you are allowed to define "specialist" roles.

Examples you can look at (but not spend too much time on this !!)

Example page with group work roles

"group role" in Google images

Below is an example of token presented in the form of a card.

Source: Co-operative groups, MargD Teaching Posters

Feel free to come up with other solutions, e.g. a 3D structure. If you copy designs, make sure that they their license allows you to do so (!)

HANDS ON: prototyping

• Imagine that you will bring your project to a school (or if not possible to another environment) where children (or other participants) will engage in some group activity
• Shortly design a scenario, i.e. a learning activity, that defines an objective in terms of learning and an measurable output that should result from the activity
• Define roles that will help the group to be more efficient
• Create a prototype for physical tokens that will summarize the role for each child
• At the end of the workshop, each group will present their solution in 2 minutes. You can consider distributing roles (leader, note taker, presenter, timekeeper) among yourselves ....

Bibliography

• Zuckerman, Oren (2006, in preparation), Historical Overview and Classification of Traditional and Digital Learning Objects MIT Media Laboratory, https://llk.media.mit.edu/courses/readings/classification-learning-objects.pdf (accessed July 2016).