Early in the spring, I got a phone call from a school principal asking what Unboxed had on group roles in projects.
This got me thinking about what we mean when we talk about “group roles” in projects. Here’s how I look at it:
The first two questions a teacher asks when design a project are “what are we making?” and “what will students learn from the process of making it?”
After they come up with (provisional) answers to those questions, they ask the next three questions:
In the process of finding answers to these three questions, a teacher starts thinking about how to put students into groups, and how to make sure everyone makes a contribution in their group. They also start distinguishing between the skills that they want to make sure everyone learns in the project, and the tasks that aren’t at the heart of the project, but nevertheless need to be completed in order for the product to be made. For example, if you are publishing a book, someone will need to lay it out, probably in a specialist program such as InDesign, but if “proficiency in InDesign” isn’t a learning goal for the project, you only need one or two students to do it.
Every experienced project-based teacher thinks about these challenges, but they do not respond to them in the same way. With that in mind, we talked to Britt Shirk and Ted Cuevas, two experienced ninth grade teachers at High Tech High Chula Vista, to find out how they approach these questions. It’s our way of answering that question the school asked me about “group roles.”
The best way to describe my approach to this is to tell you about the project I’m doing right now, which was inspired by a comedy show in which celebrities describe the biographies of historical figures from memory, and actors provide full in-costume reenactments (including lip-syncing the dialogue from the person telling the story). We share a campus from an elementary school, so my idea was “what if we do this with elementary schoolers retelling the biographies, and we call it “Kid History”? I’ve been doing it for four years and I love it.
After I had the initial concept, I started planning by dissecting an episode of the show, figuring out the process the team used to make this effortless-looking TV, and then translating that process into something ninth graders could do. And that’s the fun in developing projects is reverse engineering a professional product.
Before students even know what the project is, I give them a project attribute sheet that says “these are all of the types of talents and skills that we need.” Then there’s a list of all of the kids in their class, and I say “tell me who you see as being all of these things,” because I want them to recognize and value what other people can do and what they can do themselves.
Then I collect the sheets and spread them out on my living room floor. I look for the commonalities, and try to give the kids at least one person that they feel comfortable working with that I think has a completely different skill set than they do, because by the time I’m doing this project, we’re in November and I know them pretty well. It’s like a puzzle, but I love puzzles. So putting grouping together is my favorite thing.
One thing I do that’s probably controversial is that I put the kids who tend to have a tough time with motivation all in the same group. I think it gives the students that kind of fall into that category a chance to shine on their own, and also they can’t hide behind other students. And on the flip side, I put together teams of four leaders, where the challenge is “how are they going to be able to share the air?”
I know that other teachers will deliberately put a kid who’s inclined to take a leadership role into each group, but in my experience, when you do that, one person ends up doing all the work.
Once the groups are made, we have to research. And so each kid has to actually individually research different topics. And I do a scaffolded activity where they investigate unknown people of history, then we kind of really narrow down that. And then they come to the table to their group with their top three choices. And then from that, they teach basically each person in their group their three choices. And they use the dry erase board.
They finish this process with four choices, and make a plot diagram for each one, to figure out which has the most cohesive story. From there the writing happens, then storyboarding, then costume design, then they read their script aloud to professionals at the end of first semester and get feedback.
In second semester the groups start filming, and at that point, I assign those four roles: director of photography, head of audio (in charge of recording and editing the narration, which is provided by an elementary-school student), film editor, and head of costume and props (who also manages the actors when they’re on-set).
The role I DON’T assign is “actor”. Everybody’s an actor. You need an actor? Get someone from another group. And it works surprisingly well.
I state very clearly at the beginning of the semester that I don’t want to stick too heavily to the roles, I just need a point person so I know who to talk to in the group to find out, for example, what a group’s costume needs are.
At the beginning of class the groups sit together, and read through the daily checklist and divide up the tasks within their group.
To be honest, major drama happened a lot more when I first started doing PBL, and dealing with it has gotten a lot easier. And one thing I learned to do is that I always try to be really, really, really positive with the kids. And at the end of every class, I always tell them, “Good job today. I’m so proud of you guys. Look at the work that you’ve been doing.” And I’m naming kids, like “if you need help with editing audio clips, Okalani can help you out,” just making it feel like we’re not in a room in a school, we’re in a production company.
What I’ve noticed is that kids will perform at a high level if they know that I’m going to say something nice about them in front of the class, and I’m going to take pictures and put it in the “week ahead” email that will go to their parents.
I was not always this positive. I was not always this nice, but I’ve just learned as a PBL teacher, patience and calmness goes a long way. And I’m like, ”Okay, I’m ready to scream right now, but I’m not going to because I know that tomorrow’s a new day. And if they feel positive energy from me, they’re going to continue to be positive. If they feel the negative, then it’s going to just go downhill.”
Our team is called the co-op. Same every year. That started years ago, when Sara Islas was my teaching partner, and it was a name we put a lot of thought into. We both had experiences in college working in co-ops. They’re places where everybody is supportive, everybody cares for each other and everybody listens. This addresses equity in creating a real positive, brave—in addition to safe—community.
I apply the co-op ethos to project groups: it’s important to me that everybody learns the key skills, and everybody learns to be a leader. I don’t assign students specific “roles” unless they would have those specialized roles if they were doing this work in the professional world.
To give an example, our first big project every year is “Casa de Miedo,” in which the students create a haunted house in the ninth grade hallway. There’s a lot to coordinate within groups as well as between groups, so everybody can learn how to interact with one another in a positive way, or at least have good challenging moments so that we can reflect later and process those challenging moments.
The thing is, they’re really invested, because a lot of them went through the Casa de Miedo when they were in eighth grade, they feel the responsibility of that tradition, so they persevere and when it’s all done we can look back at the experience and address where conflicts came up, and how they could have handled them differently.
The Casa de Miedo groups are the hardest ones to make by far, because we’ve only just met the kids. But before we even make these groups, we’ve created a structure that allows everybody to learn a huge amount in their project, even (maybe especially) if their group has a tough time. That structure is the Critical Friend Forever, or CFF.
We assign everyone their CFF in the second week of school. We try to be intentional about those pairings, but inevitably they’re a bit random. And it generally doesn’t matter, because what’s important about the CFF is the consistency of meeting once a week, and the fact that at least initially they aren’t in a project group with their CFF, so they can offer an outside perspective.
Back to those groups, I try to never have more than five students in a group. And every day starts with what we call a “We Before Me” meeting. In that meeting, they look at what they need to accomplish today, and each of them writes what we call a “to-due” which is just an index card with what they, individually, are going to get done that day. This is a small way for students to take ownership of their work, and their role in the group, because without this structure, most groups will default to one person telling everyone else what to do, which tends to be unsatisfying for all of them.
This goes back to the co-op ethos, and the idea that everybody should be able to step up, and to ensure that, every team has a binder where they keep everything they’re working on. At this point normally there’s a physical binder in the classroom and its digital counterpart online, but they both serve the same purpose, which it to ensure that no matter who shows up to class from the group, they can keep making progress for the group, and we don’t get into “Well so-and-so has the technical drawing and they’re sick, so we can’t do anything today.”
What brings all of this together is how I assess students’ contributions: I use a system of badges that they earn, and these include social and emotional skills, collaborative skills, specialist knowledge such as physics concepts, and project-specific skills like soldering. I use a program called Inkwire that links assignments to the badges those assignments will help them to earn.
Now, to earn a badge, students need to present a “claim” that they have earned the badge, and provide evidence and reasoning. And that evidence will usually be a piece of work, which means that over the course of the year, they’re naturally developing a portfolio of their work. Then, when they present their learning at the end of the year, they have a rich collection of work to share and reflect on!
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