monitoring students
You can certainly determine who in the class room is getting along with each other and who is not. This allows the instructor to use different clicks within the class room to inhance teaching.
William,
this is a good point & especially can be useful in putting students into groups. Most work environments do not allow you to pick your work group or team & you must learn to get along & work well with others.
Ryan Meers, Ph.D.
If a student is allowed to lead other students into not paying attention, and is an alpha-leader to the class, he/she may lead the entire class into not paying attention. I usually give extra praise to the alpha leaders in my classes in order to have them pull the rest of the group along with the material.
Sean T. Taeschner, M.Ed.
ENGLISH 101 & 102
IADT-Seattle
Adjunct Instructor
I agree that is is excellent to be able to observe who is getting along with each other in the group and who is not for purposes of team work. However, I wish to pose another point for which to be on the "look-out" and that is which person or persons of the students might not be working and all and yet will be expecting to receive credit for the job done. This is not fair to a group or to many people. Somehow, those who are not working need to be prodded by the instructor's kind intervention (I say "kind" so that resentment will not take over the purpose of the group.)
Jacqueline,
yes, this is an excellent point that you make here. We do need to keep an eye out for those who may try to shirk & still get credit.
Ryan Meers, Ph.D.
I have a question I routinely use student groups in my class. I pick the groups and try to break up the stronger students and the weaker students which works well most of the time the stronger students usually take the lead and the weaker students benefit ffrom the extra help. My question is though what can we do as instructors when you know one person, usually a weaker student in my experience, is just riding along using the others work. How can we get them to engage and use the oportunity rather than just copy the answers?
Ian,
this is definitely a tough yet common problem. One thought would be to structure the work in such a way that all have to contribute equally & be evaluated in some way.
Ryan Meers, Ph.D.
The alpha leaders usually get more attention just because of their personality. I recently was accused of showing favoritism toward the alpha leaders in our class. This was NOT my intention whatsoever. Those students just seem to consume all of my attention.It's difficult to find a balance. Any advice?
When answering students' questions,I had never thought of the idea of giving students a check list to work through to reduce the time I spend with each student. By using this procedure it can help me to be more available with specific student concerns rather than answering the same questions repeatedly. I like this.
Patricia,
yes the efficiency gained in this is great & it still allows you to help the true individual needs & questions. You'll find that you will probably refine this list the longer you go with this.
Ryan Meers, Ph.D.
