How we form groups:
The strategy of having two or three students in a group and making sure the groups are randomly selected is one I have been using for a long time. I love TeamShake for selecting the groups and have it on my mac now so that I can project the process for the students to see. If you use Team Shake this way, you will have to make the font bigger and the backgrounds lighter so the students can see the projected image. I love it because it is super quick so I don't waste time drawing cards or whatever. On the other hand, lately we have begun to wonder how random TeamShake's choices really are. Several students keep getting paired up with the same people, so we have talked about "shaking" several times to be sure. I may also decide to intersperse card drawing occasionally so that students see that I am really serious about the randomness. I have also thought about using dice. If I put student initials on dice, then roll them under the ELMO, students will also be able to observe this process to see that it is truly random. This might not be a good strategy if you have larger classes.
The groupwork has been a challenge with Covid restrictions. Our students are in cohorts and teachers travel from room to room rather than students. I have lots of whiteboard space in my room, but other rooms don't have much at all. I have managed to squeeze several rolling whiteboards out of the Covid money and also purchased some of the Wipebooks. I know this kind of goes to the next chapter, but the point is that you can't have groups of 3 when you don't have enough whiteboard space to spread your groups out around the room. I've also discovered that social distancing is difficult as the kids want to cluster up at the board and argue about the problems. We're all masked and the students do try to stay separate somewhat, so I've finally decided not to get too crazy about maintaining the 6 foot distance. If numbers in our county start to increase (they are currently decreasing), I will have to rethink that.
Another aspect of random groups that I have found is that it is much harder in the smaller classes. We are a very small school, so my more advanced classes have fewer students in them. My class of 12 seems to struggle more and my class of 4 can basically only be split up into two pairs. There are only so many ways to make two pairs out of 4 students, so I don't know if this group will reap the benefits of random grouping as much as the larger classes. Still, I do think the benefits of having them collaborate still outweigh not collaborating, especially when paired with working on the whiteboards.
A good portion of this chapter talks about the benefits of the random groups. I don't think it is just the random groups, but the way you pose problems and they work them out--it's a whole package--that brings the benefits because I am having much more success now and I'm seeing all of the effects Liljedahl talks about. Students are more willing to collaborate and I see students who I never even saw talk before contributing to the group conversation. I have only had one student not want to participate and I made it clear that her choice was to participate or stand near her group and at least observe them. She hasn't had a problem since then. I think this goes to the elimination of social barriers. I see this especially in my Geometry class which has a very clear delineation between certain groups of students. Those groups don't seem as cliquish now. I am also seeing the knowledge mobility taking place. It is not uncommon for groups to be asking other groups about how they arrived at a certain answer or arguing about how they see the problem. And I have definitely had students tell me that they like math class a lot more now!
For the future, I feel like I still have some students who are "hiding." I don't know if this is simply because I am not seeing them contribute or because they are truly not contributing to the group. I plan to use some of his evaluation strategies with the groups to help them be more inclusive and I plan to work on my own observation strategies to be sure and watch for those quiet students I am worried about.
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