Groups and Groundwork

We started off this session with me a whole class session on the advantages and disadvantages of working as a team.

As improving the groupwork skills is a major part of the aims of this project I was keen to get this part at least touched upon early on. The learners (perhaps predictably) on the other hand, were keener to get onto the business of actually doing rather than being told what they think is the “obvious” stuff.

I think a lot of people think they ‘know’ how to work in a team and I’m not entirely sure how to tackle “well actually your manners are dreadful and you don’t give anyone else a chance to speak up”

The ones who I’ve noticed in class do do that, were the same ones sticking their hand up to contribute “listen to each other” etc, as skills required for groupworking.

Coming from a technical rather than training background and sort of drifting into adult education, I’m not 100% certain on the best and most diplomatic way of tackling that.

We have some brilliant kit and software for doing class surveys using handheld voting units (e-instruction) and I’ve seen some good self-assessments of team working handouts (cadged from the Key Skills Support Programme “Working With Others” material) which I may convert to that format and use anonymously later on.

Next task was to get people into groups. I adopted the old “one two three” counting heads around the room approach, and asked all the Ones to gather at the front, all the Two’s to gather in the middle, and all the Threes to gather at the back.

Instant chaos. No one could remember their number. Half of them couldn’t remember where I’d asked them to go. Milling and chattering left, right and centre.

In the end they sorted themselves out, though some of those learners I’d rather wanted to split up seemed to have mysteriously ended up in the same groups anyway.

Next time I make a list of who I want in each group beforehand!

The other main topic I wanted to cover before we launched into the project itself was that on Internet Safety. I expected this to be one of those “get it out the way so we’ve covered it” sessions but was surprised by the amount of discussion it generated, and also the high level of awareness of the learners of the issues, even those who were quite new to IT.

I assume this is down to the amount of coverage it gets on television etc. Lots of people knew the buzzwords about “identity theft” and “phishing” and everyone could identify with having bags of “spam” turn up in their email!

Quite a few students even asked for extra copies of the handouts so they could go home and apply some of the things they hadn’t already known to their home computers.

We just had time at the end for them to start discussing in their groups what topic their blog was going to be on. I’d put a whole host of ideas on the board, anticipating that I’d get a certain amount “I dunno — I can’t think of anything”, but in fact each group agreed an idea quite quickly amongst themselves.

Everyone seemed motivated and happy as they piled off for lunch, and I was full of smiles myself — maybe this won’t be too agonising after all!