question twelve/take one

How do you orchestrate peers groups?

In one respect, I don’t orchestrate peer groups. Insofar as I tend to think about a peer group as the members of a particular class at a particular point in time, the students, the course offerings, course schedule, registration times, major-minor requirements, etc. orchestrate those things for me each semester. What’s been interesting (mainly because it’s been different in terms of my experience working with course-based peer groups) is that in this new context (my post U of I life), there is much more cross-over in terms of course-based peer groups. That is to say, at U of I, it would never be the case, since I always and only elected to teach fyc, that a student would take two of my courses. In this way, members of the course were unlikely to know each other before class started, unless, of course, they had gone to high school together and decided to sign up for the same section of fyc—but this tended not to happen. Since I teach a greater number of classes here, it’s been the case that course-based peer groups might consist of people who I haven’t met or worked with before as well as those with whom I have. In this way, some students come in knowing each other, knowing how my courses are taught, paced, what the expectation are, etc. while, for others, certain aspects of the peer group are new to/for them.

I do, however, orchestrate groups for the in-class presentation sessions. This, in contrast to having students decide who they want to work and then present with. Since group presentation dates are usually handed out early in the semester (long before I have a sense of class or peer group dynamics), it was the case, at least at U of I, that I attended mainly to gender issues. That is, if there were four people in a group, I tried to make sure that the group was comprised of two men and two women. (Ironically, and with the exception of the fall, 2001 semester—when I learned that 20 men and 2 women were enrolled in the course—this was more than doable as it tended to be the case that the male/female ratio of each course was pretty consistently half and half.) In this new context, I tend to be less concerned with having gender-balanced group, focusing more on balancing between people who haven’t had a class with me and each other with those who have.

When it comes to in-class workshops, these are run as large-group discussions or as problem-solving or strategy trouble-shooting sessions. Two 75 minute sessions are typically devoted to workshopping a task. While not altogether wild about the “help/helped” portion of the name that has been adopted for these sessions, they tend to be orchestrated along the lines of whether or not a student feels he or she has been “sufficiently helped” by feedback from his/her peers. Sounds corny now, but if I recall correctly, this name (i.e., “have you been sufficiently helped?”) was first adopted during a semester when, tired of sitting in the usual circle-formation, we tried to a workshop that was run talk-style show (think David Letterman or Jay Leno not Springer or Jenny Jones). One member of the class volunteered to be the host (or people would take turns being host), and he/she would sit at the big desk in front and call up one or two “guests” from the audience to talk about their work—what they were hoping do to, how, why, etc. The guest would then briefly describe what he/she was working on, or trying to do. Following this, he/she would ask questions and solicit feedback from the host and audience about his or her work: “At this point, I’m thinking about doing x, y and z but I can’t find a way to make this work because I don’t have access to b, c, and d, so I’m looking for alternatives to achieve this effect.” Or, “At this point I’m trying to do x, y and z in this particular way but I don’t think these aspects are really working—does this seem feasible? If not, any ideas about what else I might do?” After feedback was solicited (and it was sometimes the case that the feedback one got led the guest on to pretty significant changes in their plans of action), and to indicate a change in turn, so to speak, the host would ask if the guest had been sufficiently helped or the guest would say that he/she had been “sufficiently helped”. . .at least for now and the next participant would be called up front.

With larger classes (i.e., of twenty or twenty-five), not everyone has had (or has necessarily wanted) the chance to have the class focus—at least not in-class, face-to-face—on whatever he/she is working on. To this end, in-class workshops are followed up by asynchronous on-line workshopping sessions and students are always welcome to kick around ideas and strategies for approaching and/or finishing a task with me over email, during office hours or, in some cases, by phone. (That my ideas/strategies are often pretty weak proves helpful, I think, in terms of helping people better identify what, exactly, they do not want to do in response to a task.)

Despite the fact that not everyone may have (or take) the opportunity to receive feedback on their work during the in-class sessions, I have found them helpful in terms of providing students with a sense of how others are approaching tasks, solving problems, strategizing, taking on or up and then transforming contexts, tools, goals and so on. Since the tasks I provide students with might be approached in any number of ways, I think it proves helpful for students to describe or otherwise model for each other how they found their ways into a particular task. While putting students in in-class groups of 2, 3 or 4 would better allow/ensure that everyone in the group has a chance to talk about their work, solicit feedback, etc. it would also mean that students (and likely I) would only be privy to the way 2 or 3 other people are thinking about and/or approaching the task. So there’s a tradeoff here, to be sure. For my part, I enjoy (and have taken much that I can go on to share with future course-based peer groups) the large group discussion approach. Plus, it makes it both possible and far easier for me to step in and ask a question, make a suggestion or reroute things if it appears that people are thinking about approaching tasks in what may be decidedly unproductive ways.