Quality Collaboration Strategies
Designing group work that allows for quality collaboration is a challenging task. Many teachers rely on how they were taught, where each student has a specific role such as time-keeper, or note-taker. The book Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom
When considering group roles, the book discusses that the traditional method of assigning a different role to each student isn’t the most effective way for groups to run. As a traditional example, one student might be tasked with keeping track of time, and another student might be tasked with keeping notes. However, aren’t these skills (note-taking and time-keeping) important for all students? Shouldn’t all students have the opportunity to practice these skills?
Instead of assigning each student a different role, all students should be responsible for participating in all roles. One student can be tasked as the “time-reminder”, reminding students to keep track of time. Another student can be tasked as the “note-checker”, to check that all students are taking their notes throughout the activity. These types of roles are better suited so that not only are all students practicing all relevant skills, but they also are being reminded by their peers about staying on task.
If you are looking to improve how you run group work in your classroom, I highly suggest reading Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom (#ad)
Teach and Assist 
This a great concept, James. This will prepare children for “the real world” because most jobs require the ability to work in groups. It will also teach children how to solve problems better because they will learn through collaboration with other students different ways to solve problems.
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Yeah you’re absolutely right Taylor. The important thing here is that a lot of teachers (myself included) will often rely on strategies they were taught with, regardless of the impact (positive or negative) those strategies have on students. In the case of group work, a lot of teachers (again, myself included) will assign exclusive group roles, where one student has a job, and no other students will participate in that job. The problem is, each job in a group is a necessary skill to learn, and all students should have the opportunity to practice those skills. This strategy fixes that problem by provided inclusive group roles, where all students are practicing all skills in their group work.
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