Project Features That Can Help Students ' Academic And Social Growth Close The Achievement Gap While Working

“When groups are planned so that each member's strengths have authentic importance to the ultimate success of the group's activity, this creates a situation where individual learning styles, skills, and talents are valued, and students shine in their fortes and learn from each other in the areas where they are not as expert.”(Willis)

The teacher prepares the students to operate in a small group together. This practice can enhance the student’s cooperative learning skills.

For this group, I added more handouts and individual work than I normally would due to the learning constraints in the room. After several attempts to have students work in groups, I learned that they simply cannot work in a group setting well. Several times, I had to improvise for students who were gone a lot due to sports, sickness, etc. However,

It promotes working together and helps find the best learning strategies and approaches to information. In social studies and math classrooms, it is crucial for students to design projects together and understand what it means to be part of a team. By introducing them to group work in middle school, they will be ready for the tasks in high school, college, and the workforce. Not only is it important for the students to collaborate, it is also essential for teachers to collaborate. If all of the math or social studies teachers get together and share experiences, their ideas will help create the most effective lessons and activities, that are engaging and beneficial to the students. It should not be limited to just the same subject teachers. The teams of teachers can create units throughout the year and tie in activities that relate directly to the themed unit. For example, if a team wants to focus on outer space, the students will study it in science, the math class will work on space word problems, language arts can read a science fiction book, and the social studies class can focus on events such as the space race. Not only should teachers collaborate within their grade levels, they should also effectively communicate with elementary and high school teachers. By doing so, middle school teachers will recognize what information the students should already know and what information they will need to know. With the use of pre and post assessments, teachers will be able to effectively communicate this

Professions and all vocations require the ability to collaborate with others. The entire school district of Jersey City is training their students from a very young age to master collaboration, despite who is assigned in your group. Several projects are given as a group effort, therefore students must complete this task efficiently with their group, or everyone’s average in that group will decrease greatly every time a similar task consisting of group work is assigned. Many teachers group the students according to their ability, and some don’t. While many disagree with this technique, I oppose this statement. I believe that students should be grouped by ability because it is equitable, non-stressful, and will act as a wake-up call for some students.

Working to ones’ strengths, however, is not always the most beneficial way to utilise group work in an educational setting. Putting members together that have different skills or traits can cause them to improve them individually, like putting an introvert and an extrovert together. An extrovert can bring an introverted person out of their shell, causing them to interact more with the rest of the group and offer more of their own opinions; while an introvert can make an extrovert learn to listen more and consider other students’ thoughts, perhaps teaching them to be less overbearing. To put together two conflicting traits can help to average out members’ work, also which can improve grades.

The first stragtey to discuss is her use of effective groupings arrangements. For instance, students are part of a whole group lesson, small group, cooperative activity, and partner work. First, Ms. Sullivan starts the lesson with the whole group seated on the carpet. This is when she introduces both the content and language objectives, discusses the target vocabulary, and explicitly reviews the lesson targets using visuals and modeling. Next, students work in partner groups using a “think, pair, share” strategy. To illustrate, students work together in partner work to discuss how they solve problems. At the end of the lesson, students also work collaboratively in a small group to complete a graphic organizer to reflect on what they learned. These grouping strategies are supported by Lev Vygotsky’s Constructivism theory. According to Vygotsky, discourse and interaction are channels for learning

“Group work is a form of voluntary association of members benefiting from cooperative learning that enhances the total output of the activity than when done individually”.

The classroom fits a learner centered classroom where the students come first. They rely on each person in their desk groups for support. At carpet time, the students are expected to turn and talk about questions posed to them throughout their learning experience. “Opportunities for collaborative learning provide benefits to students across grade levels, academic subjects, and achievement levels.” (Johnson and Johnson, 1999).

“An effective monitoring technique is using a clipboard that contains student’s names and space to record rating or notes about performance and behavior during group activities” (Evertson & Emmer, p. 170). The Group Process Approach regards the classroom to be a social system in which group process are of major importance. It assumes that instruction takes place within a group context – the classroom group. The classroom group is a social system with the characteristics of other social systems (and have a significant effect on learning). The role of the teacher is to establish and maintain a productive social system or a productive classroom group (McDonald, 2010). This can be achieved by using the Group Process Approach strategies:

1. Teamwork. Humans are gregarious and like being around each other. Young people and adults usually like working as a team. Yet often the learning activities we assign call for individual effort. Young people especially complain that they don't like doing homework alone, yet we often insist that it be done that way. By designing more team assignments, we can exploit the benefits of teamwork, where the weaker

I used to believe that I did not perform very well in groups. I am an observer who likes to learn alone. I thought I learned best when I worked on my own. Even though I always knew group work had many positive values, I was more comfortable with the lecture-based approach and resisted group work merely because it involved change, not because it had a collaborative learning approach. However, during the learning community project, I came to realize that I learn more effectively when I work in groups. Working in a group was like an adventure for me; there were both exciting and challenging times while preparing for the learning community project.

Groups will increase the interaction between students and teachers. Formation of groups will also help the students in developing problem solving skills, decision making skills and it will also enhance the communication skills. Groups are of a great use for teachers, because teaching to groups is easier, it keep the students motivated and increase their attendance too. Alongside, it will also increase the participation at the end of students. Hence, learning environment can be seen. Studying and teaching in groups will also act as simulation of the professional careers, because it will provide the students with the environment in which they have to accomplish certain task in groups (anonymous, n.d.).

Teacher-led groups are effective in introducing material, summing up the conclusion made by the groups, and meeting the common needs of the groups. These groups typically include whole class, small group, and individual instruction. Whole class instruction allows the teacher to introduce new material to the entire class. It also allows students to use their prior knowledge to form new acquisitions. “Small groups can provide opportunities for working with students who have common needs, such as reinforcement or enrichment” (Valentino, 2000, 1).

Providing the opportunity to work on such projects in an online environment can either help address those challenges or exacerbate them