Spark
a guide to redefining classroom participation
Group Goals, Individual Accountability
Materials required
Implementation procedure
Strategy in practice
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None
This strategy is light on implementation and heavy on conception. Your task as the teacher is to design group work that encourages collaboration and camaraderie but also enforces the contribution of each individual.
Introduce rewards for team-based success, but those rewards must be based on each individual within the group demonstrating their learning. “[I]f group rewards are given based on a single group product,” Slavin writes, “there is little incentive for group members to explain concepts to one another, and one or two group members may do all the work” (2011 p. 361).
What this boils down to: Group goals but individual accountability.
Ninth grade math teacher Margot regularly transitions her class to small group time to encourage knowledge sharing and peer-to-peer help. Margot has seated her students strategically so that neighboring students are relatively diverse in ability type; she wants to ensure that students who are typically strong in math are mixed with those who have persistent issues.
Description
We’ve all been there as students: dreading group work because we would end up doing all the work while our peers looked on - or even worse, someone else claims all the work for themselves!
In this section, we channel the research of Robert Slavin in arguing for you to set goals or missions for the whole group while also ensuring there are metrics in place to test individual mastery. The individual accountability Slavin promotes is designed to ensure that one person does not take the lead.
Students are tasked with working on a set of problems together. They may work alone or collaborate as much as they’d like; the purpose is to encourage them to create a supportive network. These small groups turn into teams during exam time. Students take tests alone, like usual, but Margot rewards the team whose individual members scored best.
Margot has established in this practice a group goal (to score higher than the other small groups) while ensuring individual accountability (the group’s score is based on the scores from each student’s exam).
Margot finds that this gamification has worked well: During small group time, she notices a greater push among students to teach each other. Although they don’t take tests together, it was in their interest to ensure each group member had mastery of the content - giving the team a higher likelihood of winning.
References:
Slavin, R. E. (2011). Classroom applications of cooperative learning APA Educational Psychology Handbook, 3, 359.