3 Tips to Increase Engagement and Deepen Thinking in Small Groups
Two days before the first day of school I pushed every socially-distanced desk to the edges of my classroom. Wiping away sweat and smiling with satisfaction, I reassembled the desks into groups of 3.
An hour later, I sat elbow-deep in a tub of playing cards, searching for all the 10s, Jacks, Queens, Kings, and Aces I could find.
Within half an hour, my teacher bag now full of laminated playing cards, I drove to Home Depot for sheets of melamine whiteboards to hang on any free inch of wall space around the room.
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My last task before going home that evening was to trade my 16-piece rainbow dry-erase marker set for my co-teacher’s black Expo marker stash. She asked if I was cracking under the mid-pandemic-back-to-school pressure, a concerned wrinkle in her brow.
“Nope. Just getting things ready for math small groups,” I told her.
I’d just finished reading Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, and I was determined to transform group work in my math classroom. After a year and a half of forcing kids apart with COVID protocols and social distancing, I needed a way to engage students and make them think deeply during collaborative group work.
How did playing cards, sheets of whiteboards, and a drawer full of black Expo markers help me with small groups? And did it actually improve engagement and math thinking?
It absolutely did.
Students now analyze ideas, discuss math, and communicate strategies more than ever before. The classroom crackles with excitement as they engage in collaborative groups.
The changes I made were inspired by Building Thinking Classrooms, though I modified some of them to make them my own. If you’re ready to increase engagement and depth of thinking in your math small groups, here’s where to start:
1. Rethink how you use small groups
Small groups are not only for math rotations or targeted small group instruction. They can (and should) be used in whole-group lessons too!
I call whole-class group work concurrent small groups but I’ve also heard it called collaborative small groups or non-rotational small groups. It’s where a teacher presents one math task to the whole class, then students break off into small groups to work on it.
Concurrent small group tasks work especially well before students are introduced to a new topic or concept because they have to work through a productive struggle to make sense of the task. Even if they don’t have experience with the exact skill or concept, they share ideas back and forth until a strategy or solution emerges.
Engagement and problem-solving skills skyrocket as students make math connections with each other before I ever teach one lesson.
When students come together later as a whole class to talk about the actual math concepts behind the task, they feel like they already have a foundation for the ideas they’re supposed to learn, allowing for even deeper connections.
The quality and type of task you use in parallel-group work matters, though. Tasks must be rich enough for students to do collaborative problem-solving before reaching an answer or solution. Multi-step problems, tasks with multiple extensions, problems with a variety of paths to reach the solution are all great.
After groups work through a few problems successfully, I extend their thinking by giving them the same problem again with more complicated numbers, or I give them the next (harder) set of questions in the project.
2. Rethink how you group students
One of the hardest parts for a teacher about using small groups in the classroom is the careful planning it takes to create those small groups. You need to consider ability level, social dynamics, zodiac signs... it can sometimes feel like a chess game to balance the groups out just right.
Well, guess what...you don’t have to.
Side note - you should plan out the groupings for math rotations or targeted small group instruction. Just not for concurrent group tasks.
I randomize groupings and also change the groups up every single day.
When students walk into my classroom they choose a playing card from a bag, and the card corresponds to the group they must sit at for the day. There are 3 kids per group each day. The next day, it’s a new card and a new group for everyone.
I use playing cards but you could use colors, random name spinners, Harry Potter houses… anything that students can randomly pick every time.
Students know teachers put certain students together for a reason and will fall into what they believe to be their “role” in the group. When students see they’re grouped randomly, they have the opportunity to break out of their typical group role and step slightly outside their comfort zone.
And as teachers know, just outside the comfort zone is where all the best learning happens. Creative thinking and engagement increase as students take on new roles and work with peers with different mathematical strengths and problem-solving approaches.
But you might wonder… What about those two chatterbox best friends who cannot work together because they’ll never get anything done? What if all my introverted students end up in a group together and no one takes the lead? What if all my strong-willed students end up in a group together and lock horns all class?
Believe me, I wondered about those things too.
But here’s what happened… When the talkative best friends ended up in the same group they were so excited to get a chance to work together that they did everything in their power not to mess things up—including cutting way down on the off-topic chatter.
When a group of introverts ends up together, someone always steps up to take the lead. Similarly, when strong-willed kiddos get paired up they get a chance to practice stepping back and compromise (this requires ongoing conversations on my part, but is a great opportunity for me to reinforce social-emotional skills in my classroom).
3. Rethink how students share their thinking
This is where the melamine whiteboards from Home Depot come in.
I’m a fan of dry-erasable materials in math, so using large whiteboard surfaces for group work surfaces was a no-brainer. Whiteboards take pressure off of doing math because nothing is permanent, so students feel free to try new ideas or strategies even when they’re not one hundred percent sure it’s correct.
Whiteboard surfaces around the room also make group thinking public. This gives students the message that a group task is not a competition to find the quickest solution. Instead, it is a think tank where ideas flow across groups.
I encourage groups to look around and get ideas from each other. This facilitates more spontaneous explanation, analysis, and math talk in my classroom. After all, the purpose of math class is to practice these high-level thinking skills!
It took some time for my fourth and fifth graders to get used to the idea that it’s not “cheating” as long as you share ideas and not answers. With some expectation-setting on my part, students shifted their thinking. They now love to share strategies and check answers with each other, which leads to great error analysis when answers do not agree!
Another expectation is there’s only one whiteboard marker per group. This helps make sure group members work together and not simply side-by-side on the same surface.
I give each group a black marker (to keep things fair and because black is easiest to replace), but you could use a different color for every group. Also, I ask group members to pass the marker to someone else at regular intervals. This helps prevent arguments over who controls the marker and also makes sure quieter group members have their voices heard.
A Blueprint to Increase Engagement & Thinking in Small Groups
After almost two years of social distancing, it’s time for teachers and students to reclaim the power of collaborative small groups! If you want to transform your math small groups into highly engaging, deep math learning experiences, here’s where to start:
Use small groups for whole-group lessons. Use parallel small group work to help your students make connections and discover concepts before you even teach them.
Randomize your groups. Students are more engaged and make deeper math connections when they work with different types of thinkers. Students also break out of their typical group work role and grow their collaboration skills.
Make group thinking public. Large whiteboard surfaces around the room give groups a chance to share ideas, analyze strategies, and communicate their math thinking.
If you’re interested in reading the book that inspired me to rethink my math groups, be sure to check out Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics by Peter Liljedahl.
If you try the strategies above, leave a comment below to tell me if it changes your math small groups as much as it did mine. If you haven’t tried them out yet, I promise all the desk rearranging, whiteboard hanging, and black-marker-trading will be worth it - just give it a try!