No More Throwing Your Sticks in the Middle to Pick Teams

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This year, with my Year 9s, I'm putting a focus on collaboration as students will work in groups to develop Scratch programs to help a NIST teacher improve teaching and learning in their classroom (overview here). In general, the students at our school are quite good students and, if allowed to choose their own groups, they would likely choose their friends but still manage to work fairly well. Most of them. However, as the development of an interactive Scratch program requires a range of different skills (some technical, some creative, some organizational, among others), I decided that I wanted to assign groups in which there is a reasonable balance of some of these different skills between team members. I'm hoping that this might encourage them to plan a little differently than usual. For example, if they know that one particular student has strong artistic or design skills, when planning, that student may be responsible for designing and creating custom sprites.

Structurally Sound Tower Bridge

My very first lesson of the year, I knew that my students would not yet have received their laptops for the year (1:1 program at NIST) which was an excellent excuse to get students into groups to remind them about how their peers interact in group activities. The activity was simple. I gave each team a box of supplies (paper; cue cards; coloured pencils; markers; rulers; paper clips; etc.) and asked each group to create something. They had about 50 minutes to create anything they wanted/could make with the given supplies. The results ranged from disappointing (the students' sentiments, not mine) to pretty impressive (including an Olympic-era replica of Tower Bridge in London and a Minnie Mouse puppet).

Minnie Mouse Puppet

With group dynamics and peers' skills fresh in their minds, I had the students fill out a survey on KwikSurveys (which, since the change of ownership, has gone downhill) in order to rate all of their classmates in six areas: Creativity; Problem Solving; Leadership; Knowledge/Expression; Teamwork; Digital Skills. I had done some searching for more scientific or proven skills/qualities to rate but couldn't find anything so, while I still feel that these maybe aren't the best range of skills, they served the purpose well for assigning diverse and balanced groups.

Using these results, I plotted them into a spreadsheet (shown below) and tried to assign balanced groups that should, hopefully, result in successful learning outcomes for each student. The nice thing for me is that even if students complain about their group placements, I can say that I used information that they gave me to make the decisions and it makes it seem less teacher-directed. However, as collaboration is the main thread/theme for this unit, undoubtedly, even students that get frustrated with fellow group members will still be coming away with appropriate learning experiences and will have plenty to reflect upon during the evaluating phase.

Values out of 500 because it was faster to not type a decimal

For me, it was interesting to see some of the results from the students to see how well the students know one another. Some results were fairly predictable but it was still nice to see that students do recognize the skills that their peers possess. There were a few surprising results too from students whose skills were put in more higher regards than I expected and some students whose skills were held in much lower regards than I'm sure they would care to know. Thank goodness for technology that allows for easy to use anonymity. Groups will be revealed early this week coming up so it will be interesting to see how the students react.