1. Group Work: An Overview
Otto Borchert

2. Overview 3 forms of group work
Competition, Individualistic, Cooperation
4 principles needed for effective group work
PIES
Grouping Students
4 different ways

3. Cooperative Exercise Pairs Check
What are the advantages of cooperation?

4. Cooperation Advantages Disadvantages
Well researched and include: increased understanding, increased student participation, develops social skills, mainstreams students quicker, reduces ethnic tension, and improves self esteem
Disadvantages
Different managing style
Incorrectly formulated exercises can be harmful

5. Competition Advantages Disadvantages Big motivation
Cultural Bias (Some cultures do not emphasize competition, these cultures tend to do worse under competitive stress)
Serious drop in motivation if there is no sense that it is possible to catch up
If incorrectly created, students are not compelled to help each other

6. Individualistic Individual working by themselves
Advantages: Easier to manage (Give students a worksheet that everyone must complete separately but do not grade)
Disadvantages: Students are not allowed to help each other

7. Coopetition Combination of Cooperation and Competition
Students break into teams, teams compete against each other
Balance between cooperation and competition (decreases the disadvantages of pure competition while adding cooperative advantages)

8. Good Group Exercises Kagan’s PIES principles
Positive Interdependence
Individual Accountability
Equal Participation
Simultaneous Interaction
Johnson adds Interpersonal and Small Group Skills, and Group Processing to this list

9. Positive Interdependence
Each individual's contributions to a group is needed in order for that group to be successful
Example: In the digger, sifter, dater combination. If there are no diggers, the group will not be successful, same if there are no sifters or daters.

10. Individual Accountability
Each individual needs to feel that they have contributed to the project
There needs to be a sense that everyone else has worked as well
The teacher needs to be able to recognize that everyone has played a part in the exercise

11. Equal Participation
Not only do people need to feel that they and others have worked, the participation level needs to seems equal.
No stragglers or people who end up doing all the work
In our example, the diggers, sifters, and daters need to work about the same amount of time.

12. Simultaneous Interaction
The group must be working with each other at the same time.
In our example, if the daters were all offsite from the diggers and sifter, the two groups would not be able to interact as fully to learn about the others roles.

13. Interpersonal and Social Skills
Some students need to be taught good behaviors
Ex: Don’t make fun of group members, all ideas are important and useful, etc.
Why? Some people are naturally social people, just like some are naturally good at computers. People who aren’t good at computers need to be taught the skills, just like a person who isn’t good at socializing needs to be taught.

14. Grouping Students There are a variety of ways to group students
Homogenous language groups – Students with the same language level are grouped with each other
Heterogeneous groups – Students are purposely arranged with different levels of ability and different genders and races
Random groups
Interest groups – Students select partners based on individual interests.