Making it effective

last updated:September 2010

How can you make group work effective?

Research evidence

To ensure pupils collaborate, you have to put them in a situation that requires them to interact and co-operate in order to complete the task or solve the problem. In collaborative group work, you will be establishing activities that require pupils to:

• work together as a group
• exchange ideas and resources
• contribute to group discussions
• challenge others’ reasons and understandings
• discuss alternatives, and
• accept responsibility for the group’s decisions.

Your evidence

You may find it helpful to review how your pupils conduct group work using the questions below as a framework to analyse what happens. Or you might like to ask a trusted colleague to observe a group work activity in one of your lessons and give you feedback about the following items:

• Do pupils take turns or do they frequently talk over each other or interrupt?Do they invite contributions from each other?
• Do they listen to each other, and respond and react to each other's contributions?
• Do they invite each other to offer explanations (e.g. by asking ‘Why do you think that?’)
• Do pupils elaborate their contributions by providing reasons, explanations, and examples?
• Do pupils modify what they say in the light of each other’s comments?
• Do they pool ideas before reaching a group decision?

Next steps

Using yours or your colleague’s observations, can you identify your pupils’ strengths and weaknesses in group working?  Could you use your evidence as a focus for a discussion about group work with your pupils? Would it be helpful to work with your pupils to build rules for structuring group discussion and observe the effects of these rules on a subsequent group work activity?