Gettin it done grouped up

[Adam Ross]

The image from my tutoring that will stay with me the longest is the image of three girls sitting at a table, collaborating on a lab report for their chemistry class. I have worked with each of these three girls independently before on other subjects, so the image of them working together is flavored in my mind by my knowledge of how they work independently. One of the girls is very social and in my experience has gotten distracted talking to lots of different students and tutors. One of the girls is marginally less distractable and though she does talk to the tutors and her peers, tends to stay in shorter conversations and have her work open and continue to add to it. The third girl I had only met that day during the previous hour, and seemed on edge about all of the work she needed to complete. Going into seventh hour, my presumption was that I would come to the table with these three girls, tell them that it was my day and I enjoyed working with them, and then they would tell me that they didn’t have any particular questions and I would go on to more students. But when I came to their table, all three of them were typing away at the first page of a lab report on phase changes by evaporation. They were all sitting next to each other and talking to each other about the questions that came up as they worked on a google doc on their separate computers. They asked me to help them brainstorm examples of evaporation in everyday life, and the four of us came up with four good examples.

This image is representative of my experience tutoring because I could see the collaborative, informal nature of the students’ conversation along with the serious academic growth. I’ve had a lot of purely academic conversations with students whom I was helping with an assignment or to study, and a lot of non-academic conversations just about our lives. The girls working on a lab report had the notes of both types of conversation, they were growing academically but also talking with each other on a topic which they were clearly engaged in. In a sea of students either engaged with playing video games on their phones and other students reluctantly chugging along with their coursework, here were three students having a good time writing a lab report for a class and deepening their understanding of chemistry. I know student motivation is highest when students are having fun, but a big challenge I have observed in the Student Support Center is making those two things happen with a particular student at the same time, though a lot of learning and a lot of fun occur.

I don’t know what difference made these girls so much more engaged writing their lab report than each of them individually finishing an English paper or a math worksheet, but my goal as a teacher should be to isolate that chemical and inject it into all of my lessons. Pinpointing what will pique student motivation is difficult, and although I know students are more motivated when their models present plausible ways of doing things in ways that increase their growth, I don’t feel like I have a grasp of what will make the same students more motivated in one part of my curriculum than another. Aside from maybe making the important parts worth more in my grading. But maybe it had to do with the collaborative nature of writing this lab report. Watching the social girl who has trouble focusing on work she is supposed to complete on her own kill it while working on a group assignment was certainly thought-provoking. If we want our students to be motivated, we could figure out the ways they naturally behave and tailor our coursework to fit these styles of working. Combining talking with her friends with writing a lab report was a fantastic way to make the social girl stay on task. One of her partners was stressed about finishing all of her work, so there was social pressure on the other two to stay on topic, and I saw this style of working pay off for this group.

A conclusion this image has brought me to is that we must pay attention not only to the quality of our students’ final products or evaluations, ie test grades, but also their motivation throughout the course. We can’t wait until a test to see how students are doing, we need to watch them do work and see if they are growing or slacking in the environment we have created for them. I hope the decision to make this lab report a group assignment was deliberate, I hope the teacher saw how their students get distracted by other people when they are doing solitary tasks and predicted that they would produce better work if they work in groups. I hope to be the kind of teacher who sees when their students are giving their all to the class, and is able to recreate the conditions that lead to this. Some teachers see a “good class” where their students are fulfilling their expectations and a “bad class” where their students are slacking off, but I can’t imagine that mathematically this can be true. Student talent is distributed arbitrarily to classrooms of 20-30 students usually, so every class that is the same has about the same amount of talent. It’s possible that some classes are worse off because they are later in the day, but my high school had a block schedule where classes met “23412” periods throughout the week to balance these factors out. More likely is that one class responds better to my style of teaching than the other, and I should look for solutions specific for each classroom. For the three girls in the student support center, this solution was to make lab reports a group assignment.

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