Thursday, November 12, 3:00 pm–4:30 pm
Designing Group Work that Really Works
Georgian Room, IMU
CAUTION: Group assignments can and, all too often, do more harm than good. The most common sign of trouble is when students (especially the better ones) feel like they have choose between doing more than their fair share of the work or risk getting a bad grade. When that happens, the real cause usually isn't the students' it's almost always what the teacher is asking them to do. In addition, even if the end product is a good one, a high percentage of students will leave the experience with negative feelings about the value of group work.
In this session, you will engage in a series of activities that demonstrate why most problems with learning groups are caused by poorly designed assignments. In addition, you will learn about four keys that will enable you to design group assignments that: 1) are effective for developing students' application and critical-thinking skills, 2) promote positive student attitudes about group work, 3) can be graded easily and fairly and, 4) can be used with any level of students and in classes of up to several hundred students.
Larry K. Michaelsen is the David Ross Boyd Professor Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma, Professor of Management at Central Missouri State University, a Carnegie Scholar, a Fulbright Senior Scholar and former Editor of the Journal of Management Education. He is active in faculty and staff development activities and has conducted workshops on teaching effectively with small groups in a wide variety of university and classroom settings. Dr. Michaelsen has also received numerous college, university and national awards for his outstanding teaching and for his pioneering work in two areas. One is the development of Team-Based Learning, a comprehensive small-group based instructional process that is now being used in over 100 academic disciplines and on over 200 campuses in the US and in eight foreign countries.
