When Fewer is More, the Use of Small Group Instruction in the Classroom

“Alright,” the teacher says to the students, “I’m going to number all of you off into groups. Each group will read a section from the textbook and become experts on that section. Then, each group will teach the rest of the class what they learned from their reading.” This is an instruction common to the classrooms in the United States. More and more is the pedagogy of public education leaning in favor of team-based activities, projects, and learning. Group work is generally seen as an ultimately beneficial way to teach students, but this may be somewhat of a fallacy. The emphasis on group-based learning in public schools causes a multitude of problems.

Group discussions are beneficial as this teaching method is useful as it allows the learners to share information about their personal experiences and is both economically and time

6. Group study is extremely useful because discussions will help make the material and concepts easier to remember and deepen your understanding. You will be asked to work in small groups in class—take advantage of this learning opportunity!

Generally group learning is cost effective for employers, employees/learners and providers. Enabling continued and multi use of materials, resources and facilities. Group learning also ensures a consistent, common message and programme.

In the article “Small Group Communication” Garth Pittman states that working in groups can actually be very helpful because it will get the job done faster, and develop skills that can be useful at work, school, and/or personal life. He clarifies that people will have different ideas and collaborate with one another to work well in the group. If they can get along well and manage to separate the work, then the project will get done on time without having any troubles. Pittman points out working in groups can get complicated. Few people in the group will not connect with the rest of the members. For those who aren’t used to being in groups can find themselves having a hard time getting use to it. The author believes that there is certain ways

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

A group should be small between five to nine persons, so that each one will be able to relate and engage every member in the group. The group is viewed as a system, the condition of any member affects the other (Fatout, 1992).

When teachers have the opportunity to work with students in smaller groups they can provide extended intensive lessons in addition to whole group instruction. The study showed that when children receive information in whole group instruction and then the information is reinforced in small group instruction they build a stronger vocabulary, and they are able to retell more facts. Overall, this study creates awareness of the benefits of small group instruction.

With the heterogeneous groups the level of discussion and cooperative work is increased, providing benefits for every student partaking. According to Paul Burden and David Byrd (2012), “Having students work in groups generally has a positive effect on their achievement when compared to their work as individuals.” Small-group work and discussions allows for students to improve their communication skill, cooperation skills, and gain new insight and understanding from their peers in a way that could not be achieved working alone.

Having had the opportunity to assess children’s learning during PPL3, it is clear that there are certain strategies that best suits the needs of individuals. From studying lesson plans and evaluations, and from general observation it is clear that group work was often beneficial, and gave the children the chance to work with peers of different ability levels and different learning styles, so that they were able to develop and learn from their peers. Group work is great for getting children to work collaboratively, whether this is as a pair, or as a group of 6, or a group of 12, it takes them out of their comfort zones and to adapt to new situations. Using different strategies such as think-pair-share and mixed ability groups as well as self chosen groups can really determine the quality of children’s learning. I shall be looking into these strategies and reviewing my own teaching and how they were beneficial or detrimental towards a child’s education.

The purpose of this qualitative, descriptive case study is to identify the impact small group instruction has on academic achievement, attendance, and behavioral problems in a middle school. Phase one will incorporate teacher insight and perspective into students perceived academic skill set and usefulness of small group instruction. This will indicate and provide indicators that regardless of the group instruction implemented, strategies to engage the students not currently participating in the small groupsettings are necessary. On the other hand, an overtaxed, stressed-out teacher with too many small-group or individual learning activities may not be emotionally available to sensitively respond to the diverse needs of all children (Reutzal,

This strategy was effective because by having a teacher at each group, it minimized the misconceptions that some students could have had throughout the lesson. It also helped by having all student’s questions answered. Some students do not like having to ask questions in a whole group classroom environment, so by having a teacher at each group it helped all the students with feeling comfortable by asking questions in a small group environment. In addition, by having a teacher at each group, it helped behavior management due to a teacher constantly being involved in one group, and making sure the

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.

I am Zeeshan Ali; I am working as a Computer teacher for Classes VI-X-M in Canal Side Boys Campus. I have done Masters in Computer Science (MCS) from Punjab University College of Information and Technology (PUCIT) Lahore. The students are the main focus of every teacher and our entire teaching efforts circle round our students to achieve the set targets. Effective Teaching includes many useful teaching strategies that a teacher chooses according to the requirement of his/her respective subject and topic as well. In result of my years of experience and as a Computer teacher I find Group Work as the most effective and fruitful technique at every level.

Such findings were also reported by Adhikari (2007) in Nepal, Ozsevik (2010) in Turkey, Ansarey (2012) in Bangladesh and Vongxay (2013) in Laos. They indicated that the number of students in the class was an issue that made it hard to manage several groups within one class. Such findings were also emphasised in responding to question 6 in the questionnaire where 68% of the teachers stated that they had from 20 to 40 students in their classes (see Table 6). This would suggest that teachers need to divide students into eight or ten groups in order to implement communicative activities successfully and, thus, it would be difficult to manage all groups.