Ch 7 Group Work That Grows Understanding

I love this chapter because it is one group work. I have always had mixed feelings about group work as a future educator and as a student. She starts off with a story about her class and a group work assignment that she gave them. As she is going around the room she realizes that the group discussion is going pretty well. Tovani was not always as enthusiastic or believing in group work. She says that they are very hard to control and had to do some outside research to see how to conduct successful group work. She watched adult groups like book clubs, department meetings, and so on to see how adult group work is successful and how she can use that in her classroom. She found that the adults have a lot of control and and tend to do better because of this. So she realized that some control has to be given to the students when it comes to who is in their groups. Another thing that she did as to ask the students what things they dislike about group work. What better way to learn about something then from the people that actually experience it. 
A lot of the comments that came back were about annoying people in the groups and group member that slack off. She then decided to show the group a demonstration of her and a colleague in a group situation. She decided that she would show an unsuccessful group instead of a successful one. So without telling the other teacher what was going on she decided to play the bad group member and not do the work and to turn around and talk to her neighbors. The students seemed to really understand the rudeness and importance of having your work done and your materials there. She also decided to give the students a way to ask to change groups. This way they have some control over it but she also still wants to have control of the class so she has the final say on any changes. Another thing that she decided was that she would grade each student individually instead of as a group in case some people slacked off. I found this to be fair but as a student has worked in many groups and has had many fellow students slack off. The thing about the good students that don't slack off is that it is a group project and they feel that all the work has to be finished. So the group members that are hard workers will do the jobs of the other members that slacked off as well. This is extremely annoying and we also don't get anything extra for picking up the slack. It is very discouraging to the good students. 
A lot of preparation is needed to have successful small group work. They can be very beneficial because they allow more students to share their ideas instead of it being the entire classroom. There are also some downfalls to this and as an educator we need to keep both of these in mind and not just write something off because we think it is too hard.