Group work

I love group work, I am coming to the understanding the students for the most part love group work. They get so much out of it, they are engaged and interactive with each other, they develop team work and understanding of each others weakness and strengths. I have been using it with my year 8 and year 10.

I really enjoy teaching through group work, yes it does require some extra thought when planning the lessons but I find that I find teaching the lessons far more enjoyable and easier to teach.

The lessons that I have been making group work focussed are either practical focussed or the students are teaching each other.

My favourite group work lesson with my year 10s this year was the end of last term. We were finishing up a topic looking at human transport systems and the focus was on the components of the blood. For this activity I split the class in half  (class size is 15 and 17) and had them work through the information I had given them and quick blurb I gave them at the beginning. Their task was to work through the four pages of notes filling in as much as they could as a group.  The had free range of sources they could use, their notes, textbooks, devices. I gave them a set time limit of 15-20 minutes to complete the task the I wondered round checking in and giving help as and when required.

This activity worked really well with one of my yr 10 and not so much with the other even though I gave them more scaffolding and assistance. They just didn't seem to be engaged and willing to take advantage of the opportunity. I suspect it has something to do with there maturity level of the two classes and the small class is at a higher academic level than the other class.

The other group activity I did with the year 10 last term was using the SOLO hexagons. I love this activity and used it to assess prior knowledge of the acid and bases chemistry topic.  This activity again had a very similar outcome as the previous group work activity. I structured this activity differently with them work in pairs or 3's to begin with and then coming together as a class to build the big picture.  What I really liked about this activity was how engaged the students were and the depth of their prior knowledge. This allowed me to really tailor the teaching to each of the classes and meant I was able to identify the knowledge and ability ranges that I had across the 2 classes.

With my year 8 I took a different approach to reflect the age and ability of the class. For this group work activity they had to write a title, aim, hypothesis and method for an experiment that we carried out.  Before that started I went over the experiment with the class as a whole and outlined on the board what equipment was available and the 3 conditions that needed to the tested.  In the previous lesson we had learnt about the theory behind the experiment and why it was important. I split the class into 5 groups of 4 and gave each group 6 mini white boards to complete the activity and to write up their experiment.  I gave them 20 mins to complete this and they worked really well. They spread themselves over the floor of the lab and everyone was really engaged and the ideas were flowing and good science was taking place.

After 20 minutes or so everyone sat back at the desks in their groups and as a class we wrote the title, aim and method for the experiment. These 3 parts all ended up been all the ideas combined and each group kept their own hypothesis and unsurprisingly the 5 methods were all very similar.  The next lesson we carried out the experiment and it will run for the next week or so while they have exams.


I am coming to love group work and the more I introduce it and use it in class the more receptive the students are becoming to it. I am also finding the engagement level is increasing and they are taking more ownership of their learning.