Group Work That Works

Promote cooperative learning more effectively by transforming your classroom into a learning community. Experienced K–12 educators Paul J. Vermette and Cynthia L. Kline offer their Dual Objective Model as a tool for improving your students’ academic achievement and problem-solving skills, while encouraging their social and emotional development. You’ll discover how to: assign meaningful tasks that require students to rely on one another; build efficient teams, purposefully monitor group dynamics, and assess group projects effectively; engage students in schoolwork while developing crucial career and life skills; motivate students to see the importance of personal and group responsibility; maximize the benefits of student diversity in your classroom. Emphasizing teamwork, persistence, communication, self-regulation, and empathy in a complex, diverse, and technological setting, these strategies can be easily incorporated into any curriculum. The book is filled with vignettes and sample exercises to help you apply the ideas to your own classroom. Each chapter includes a list of "Big Ideas," which invites you to consider how these strategies can evolve over time.

In this book, Sue Cowley offers teachers a practical and easy to read guide to the subject of group work. She explains a variety of strategies that teachers can use immediately in their classrooms, to help all their students work more effectively in groups. Sue offers advice on using group work for the right reasons and on helping students take on different roles within groups. She examines the rights and responsibilities required for great group work, offers routines and structures for helping group work run smoothly, and shows you how to give your students the richest possible learning experience. This book will help you gain a fresh insight into a key teaching technique. You will learn how to use groups more effectively and, through doing so, enhance learning for all your students. This mini guide is written in Sue's much-loved honest and straight talking style. No theory, no jargon, just down to earth techniques that really work. Whatever the age of students or the subject you teach, your classroom practice will benefit from the strategies and techniques that she reveals here. Read Sue's concise guide now and find out how to get all your students learning well in groups.

School counselors are often the only employees in school settings with any formal education in group work, and yet their training is typically a general course on how to run groups. Group Work in Schools provides an alternative training model; one that presents exactly what counselors need to know in order to successfully implement task-driven, psychoeducational, and counseling/psychotherapy groups in any educational setting. Additions to this newly updated second edition include: discussion topics, activities, case examples, integrated CACREP standards and learning outcomes, as well as an overall update to reflect the most recent research and knowledge.

This highly successful book on groupwork practice, first published in 1979, has become a standard introductory text on most social work training courses. It is very popular with social workers, whatever their agency setting, and is also used by health visitors, youth workers and the voluntary sector. This new enlarged and revised third edition includes two new additional chapters. The first of these addresses the issue of groupwork in day and residential centres where special kinds of group skills are required in addition to those already well established for fieldwork groups. The second new chapter attempts to understand the significance of race and gender in groupwork and to begin to develop a framework for anti-discriminatory practice. All key sections from previous editions have been retained and updated, while those on group composition, open groups, co-working and consultation have been extended and revised to give more comprehensive coverage. The bibliography has also been developed to include the most recent additions to the groupwork literature, including many articles from the journal Groupwork for which Allan Brown is co-editor.

Collaboration drives progress in every area of life and industry. From business to politics, collaboration is an in-demand skill that today's students need--so why does the modern education system focus almost exclusively on individual tasks and assessments that leave students unprepared for the collaborative world? Maybe it's because of how difficult group work has been to plan, manage, and assess. In The Collaborative Classroom, Trevor Muir brings to light the dynamic possibilities that occur when students learn to work together. Muir shares how to teach students to do it effectively so that teachers can actually love group work. He shares the tools, techniques, processes, and inspiration developed from his own classroom and from the insights and experience gained from master educators and industry leaders. This book is for you if you want to . . . Effectively manage collaborative work time Design the optimal groups Help students give and receive constructive criticism Facilitate student-led collaborative class discussions Empower all students, introverts and extroverts from any grade and any subject area, to purposefully and meaningfully collaborate "The Collaborative Classroom is a practical guide for teaching all students--whether in a K-12, college, or beauty school---to combine their gifts and successfully collaborate." --Winn Claybaugh, founder and dean of Paul Mitchell Schools "Trevor skillfully provides the blueprint for intentional teaching of collaboration skills by sharing a repertoire of strategies, resources, and tools that are eminently practical and yield a higher level of problem solving. . . . This is a must-read for any teacher or administrator." --Kim Austin, principal of Kate Waller Barrett Elementary School "Trevor Muir has crafted a practical guide that helps teachers tackle one of the biggest challenges they face: how to cultivate meaningful collaboration. As a master storyteller, he shares powerful examples of what happens when teachers take collaboration to the next level with their students." --John Spencer, professor and coauthor of Launch and Empower

As teachers today work in ever more challenging contexts, groupwork remains a particularly effective pedagogical strategy. Based on years of research and teaching experience, the new edition of this popular book features significant updates on the successful use of cooperative learning to build equitable classrooms. Designing Groupwork, Third Edition incorporates current research findings with new material on what makes for a groupworthy task, and shows how groupwork contributes to growth and development in the language of instruction. Responding to new curriculum standards and assessments across all grade levels and subject areas, this edition shows teachers how to organize their classroom so that all students participate actively. This valuable and sensible resource is essential reading for educators at both the elementary and secondary levels, for teachers in training, and for anyone working in the field of education.

Through using spoken language, people are able to think creatively and productively together. This ability to ‘interthink’ is an important product of our evolutionary history that is just as important for our survival today. Many kinds of work activity depend on the success of groups or teams finding joint solutions to problems. Creative achievement is rarely the product of solitary endeavour, but of people working within a collective enterprise. Written in an accessible and jargon-free style, Interthinking: putting talk to work explores the growing body of work on how people think creatively and productively together. Challenging purely individualistic accounts of human evolution and cognition, its internationally acclaimed authors provide analyses of real-life examples of collective thinking in everyday settings including workplaces, schools, rehearsal spaces and online environments. The authors use socio-cultural psychology to explain the processes involved in interthinking, to explore its creative power, but also to understand why collective thinking isn’t always productive or successful. With this knowledge we can maximise the constructive benefits of our ability to interthink, and understand the best ways in which we can help young people to develop, nurture and value that capability. This book will be of great interest to academic researchers, postgraduates and undergraduates on Education and Psychology courses and to practicing teachers. It will also appeal to anyone with an interest in language, creativity and the role of psychology in everyday life.

"Group work is a growing trend in schools, as educators seek more complex, more authentic assessment tasks and assign projects and presentations for students to work on together. The Common Core State Standards call for increased student collaboration in various subject areas, and collaboration is considered one of the 21st century skills that students need to master in order to succeed in school and beyond. Many teachers, though, are uncomfortable giving group grades, which may or may not actually reflect an individual student's learning. How else to proceed? Assessment expert Susan M. Brookhart offers practical advice, strategies, and examples to help teachers understand the following: What the differences are between group projects and cooperative learning. How to assess and report on (but not grade) learning skills and group interaction skills. How to assess and grade individual achievement of learning goals after group projects. Why having students work together is a good thing--but group grades are not"--Provided by publisher.