Learners can benefit from both individual and group work, depending on the learning goals and objectives.
a) Individual Work:
- Promotes deep, focused processing and metacognition
- Builds automaticity and fluency for basic skills
- Facilitates reliable assessment of individual learners
b) Group Work:
- Produces elaboration and multiple perspectives
- Enables distributed cognition and complex problem-solving
- Develops communication, collaboration, and social problem-solving skills
When to Use Each:
- Individual work for:
- Remembering and understanding basic concepts
- Building foundational skills
- Assessing individual knowledge
- Group work for:
- Applying, analysing, synthesising, and evaluating complex information
- Developing teamwork, leadership, and communication skills
- Encouraging creativity and social learning
Designing Effective Tasks:
- Consider complexity, positive interdependence, and accountability
- Use scaffolds like worked examples, sentence starters, and graphic organisers
- Assign roles and rotate them regularly
Assessment Approaches:
- Formative: exit slips, quizzes, and teacher observation
- Summative: group artefacts and individual tests/portfolios
- Use rubrics to assess content understanding and collaboration skills
By intentionally combining individual and group work, teachers can leverage the strengths of both approaches to support learner growth and development.
How do we facilitate their problem-solving process
We facilitate problem-solving by structuring the process, modelling strategies, scaffolding with prompts, encouraging collaboration, and guiding reflection.
Without removing the productive struggle that fosters growth in learners.
