Effective small group teaching
Learning is a social process that occurs through interaction with others. Effective tutorials, whether face to face or online, are characterized by a positive and pleasant atmosphere. The TA/GTA can play a key role in facilitating a collaborative learning environment by:
- Providing a safe cooperative environment where all students are respected and where opinions can be expressed and explored honestly
- Ensure equal participation, ie, encourage contribution from quieter students, find techniques to structure contribution from students that dominate the group
- Structuring effective groups
- Preparing students to work cooperatively – social skills, trust and team building exercises, group processing
- Helping students understand and define the task
- Ensuring that students have the knowledge, skills and resource to carry out the task
- Observing student interaction, checking progress and intervening to help groups or students having difficulty
- Intervening to support the use of collaborative skills and ensure participation from all group members
- Guiding group processing to ensure effectiveness
- Providing immediate feedback during the life of the group
- Tying ideas together and integrating the learning outcomes from the task into future learning
- Evaluating and giving feedback on how well students completed the task.
- Encourage contribution from quieter students via non-verbal feedback when they venture a tentative comment
Go to Clark & Baker FOR AKO Aotearoa, 2015 "Cooperative learning made easy: A practical guide to working with tertiary student groups" for collaborative learning ideas (p. 7 onwards), group formation, dealing with problems among group members and a template for peer review.
Time management and good questioning techniques are crucial to supporting all students in their learning
Scenario: They asked me a question and I didn’t know the answer – how embarrassing!
There are times when a student asks a question that you don’t know the answer to. If you have done adequate preparation for the class, you have no reason to be embarrassed – there are always limits to your knowledge and you can’t be expected to know everything. What to do in this situation? Be honest about it and offer to:
- Find out the answer for the student and clarify the answer in the next session.
- Go and ask another TA/GTA in the class.
- Recommend appropriate readings, or a person who is likely to know the answer (eg, the course coordinator or lecturer).
- Find out with the student on the spot and learn together.
- Do this task in a small group of students to find the answer and compare notes on the different approaches. This is a good way of collectively working on a problem and learn from each other and encourages peer to peer and student teacher interactions.