SUMMARY
Grouping – how do I do this in an EAL classroom?
We want to prepare our students for success outside the classroom. In this episode, we will look at a few strategies on how we can assist our students to be better communicators and team members.
Types of grouping for better outcomes.
Success criteria for setting up group work tasks.
Adding cooperative learning to group work to make a difference in student engagement and participation.
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Teachers often question why we ask students to work in groups? As we discussed in the previous video, there is a difference between group work and cooperative learning. We need to keep in mind that we are now preparing our students for jobs that may not even exist during their time with us. Creating opportunities for students to work together allows space for students to strengthen their emotional intelligence, teamwork, diversity awareness, personal accountability, and leadership skills to name a few. Today, we will look at how we can group our EAL students. Let’s start with the types of groups that work best in an EAL classroom.
There are many different student grouping strategies out there. The table above is a suggestion of what may work well in an EAL classroom. We need to experiment and determine what best works for our particular student cohort. Now, let’s have a look at the success criteria to getting the most out of our student groups:
Success criteria for active participation:
We have added a cooperative learning strategy – ensures that all team members have equal opportunities to be active participants.
We have added individual roles and responsibilities – all members are accountable for the team to succeed.
Our instructions and outcomes are clear and the tasks are linked to the curriculum.
We have deliberately created information gaps in our tasks – all team members need to collaborate and add new information in order to complete the task.
We have pre-taught the social skills necessary for successful teamwork.