The Ken-Ton Curriculum & Instruction Department is spending the rest of the 2024-2025 school year focusing on high-impact practices used in our classrooms across the district. For the remainder of the school year, we’ll be highlighting a different practice each month and spotlighting two of our teachers who excel at modeling this type of practice.
April's focus is “Productive Group Work”. This practice is meant to foster the academic and social growth of all students learning together with structure and purpose. It includes positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction, accountability, interpersonal skills, group processing, and meaningful tasks.
Two teachers who model this type of practice well are Franklin Middle School Gr. 7 teacher Julie Moore and Edison Elementary teacher Courtney Cefaratti.
We stopped by Cefaratti’s classroom on April 2nd as she was incorporating Productive Group Work into her math lesson. Each student had to pair up and stand across from their partner; one student facing the exterior windows and the other facing the white board at the front of the classroom. The student facing the window had a small dry erase board and marker. Cefaratti then put an image on the big white board and instructed the students facing the white board to describe the image, in the best detail as possible, to their partner, who then had to draw the image from the description.
“We call it Match Mine, and it’s a great way to introduce geometry and angles,” Cefaratti said. “It helps students see the importance of using precise language when you are talking about figures such as angles, rays, lines, and line segments.”
After that segment, Cefaratti split the students up into five different small groups for something she calls Round Robin. Each group was given the same question and the students in the group had to share their thoughts with each other. After talking among themselves, Cefaratti randomly called on a student from each group to share their overall thoughts. This meant each student had to hold themselves accountable and listen closely to their peers.
Cefaratti uses Productive Group Work every day and tries to embed it into at least two lessons. By using this practice, she has seen higher levels of participation, increased quality of work, a greater level of understanding, and empathy.
"Throughout the year, I have seen students grow both academically and socially. It has promoted positive interdependence and face-to-face interactions, while providing opportunities for group processing as students to learn how to respectfully disagree with one another, listen to the perspective of others, defend their reasoning, and come to a consensus," she said. “They’ve also learned that processing takes time for some, and have become accustomed to asking their partners, ‘Do you need coaching, or time?’ when determining how to best support each other.”
Franklin Middle English teacher Julie Moore agrees with the impact productive group work has on students.
“Productive group work helps students develop confidence in their abilities,” she said. “They learn that their own weaknesses are often similar to their peers, and they work to grow their skills in these areas. They also grow in confidence when they are able to positively impact the learning of a peer.”
We visited Moore’s classroom on April 23rd as students were being introduced to eight different research/debate topics. Students were split into small groups and were provided a short overview of each topic. Each student took ownership of two of the topics and presented their understanding of their chosen topics to the rest of the group. Afterward, they facilitated a brief discussion of that topic and took notes as their peers discussed the pros/cons of each topic.
“Productive group work like the lesson above keeps everyone accountable for everyone’s learning,” Moore said. “It helps to develop core relationships and productive rapport in the classroom.”
On April 24th, the notes were used in a gallery walk activity where students chose a topic and, in small groups, created a poster/display to create interest in the topic. They then did a 30-second pitch of their topic to the class. Students then submitted their top three areas of interest and will be assigned research teams in which students will develop their understanding of the topic, present formal debates and projects on the topic they’re assigned. The research project is just one of the many ways Moore has used productive group work to improve her students’ abilities and impact their way of learning and comprehending the material.
“I've seen the greatest impact from productive group work on students' written development. Students have spent a lot of time co-creating parts of written tasks,” Moore said. “The shared effort and honest feedback help students to develop better sentence structure, coherence of overall paragraphs, and most importantly, confidence in their abilities. Students learn from one another what their strengths (and weaknesses) are.”
We’re so proud of our teachers for embracing and using “Productive Group Work” in their everyday curriculum. Next month, we’ll be focusing on our final high-impact practice, “Choice”, and will be spotlighting two more teachers who excel at using this type of practice.
