Group Work Reflection and Self-Assessment

1. Discuss your expectations for what collaboration looks like with students. Ensure that your expectations match the components of the rubric, or alter the rubric to match your expectations.

2. Ensure that students understand every component of the rubric. Consider modeling what it looks like to meet the criteria, or not meet the criteria, in the rubric. This rubric includes the following:

   • Making sure everyone in the group understands

   • Making sure everyone has a chance to contribute by sharing their ideas

   • Offering ideas

   • Staying on-task and focused

   • Putting in effort

   • Completing work outside of class

3. Set clear expectations for the 1-5 scoring.

   • If you currently use a different rating system (such as Marzano's levels), you may want to alter the rubric to match.

   • It is important that students understand what each number means in regard to each component. Provide explicit criteria for each number.

4. Support students to practice using the rubric to self-assess and assess the members of their group. It is important that students understand how to appropriately assess and provide feedback to their peers. Support students to appropriately do so; provide feedback on the scorings.

5. Build student capacity utilizing the rubric. Eventually the rubric should be an independent tool for collaboration in the classroom.

6. Use the rubric whenever students are working in groups. Have students carefully reflect when completing the self-assessment. Review students’ ratings of other students.

7. Have students review their teammates’ ratings. Consider having them reflect or set goals based on this feedback.

8. Use the rubric frequently to support students to grow in their collaboration skills. Change the components of the rubric as necessary.

Reflecting on group work completed during synchronous distance learning sessions is important for students to make progress and growth.  Completing group work during synchronous learning sessions is very different than group work in the brick and mortar classroom.  The group work reflection provides an opportunity for students to reflect and apply their reflections for future group assignments.  

Implementation steps:

1. Determine what the expectations are for productive group work during synchronous distance learning sessions.  The BetterLesson strategy linked below, Developing Norms to Support Productive Group Work, discusses how to set up norms and expectations for group work with students.  Consider using the reflection tool for students to both self-assess and/or reflect on the work of the group as a whole.  Some expectations to consider using in the reflection tool include: 

   • Making sure everyone in the group understands the assignment and their role and responsibilities

   • Making sure everyone has a chance to contribute by sharing their ideas

   • Offering ideas

   • Staying on-task and focused

   • Putting in effort

   • Completing work outside of the synchronous class session

2. Explicitly teach the group work expectations to students and model what it looks like to meet expectations.  

   • If teaching the group work expectations synchronously, share the expectations list with students.  Model, or give specific examples, of meeting expectations.  

   • If teaching the group work expectations asynchronously, provide students with a video recording or screencast describing the group work expectations along with specific examples of what meeting those expectations looks like.  Loom is a great tool to use to create screencast recordings.  The resource linked below, How To Use Loom, provides a tutorial on setting up and using Loom. 

3. Using the group work expectations, develop a reflection tool that students will use to reflect on their work and their group members' work after the group work assignment is complete.  The reflection tool should be shown to students so they know the expectations for reflection once the assignment is complete.  

   • The Poll Everywhere website is a great tool to use as an electronic resource for reflection after a group assignment.  The tutorial linked in the resources section below, Getting Started With Poll Everywhere, provides a description of how to set up and share a poll for students.  

   • Mentimeter is another engaging technology tool to use to create a reflection tool.  Mentimeter allows the teacher and students to see live data from a poll.  This is a great way to immediately engage in the reflection, and discuss the results within a synchronous learning session.  The resource linked below, Mentimeter Tutorial, shows a quick video on how to create a Mentimeter.

4. Use the reflection tool whenever students are working in groups during synchronous distance learning sessions. 

5. Use the results of the reflection tool to engage students in discussions about strengths, areas of improvement, and challenges about their group.  Allow students to meet in small group sessions, or breakout rooms, to engage in these reflection discussions.  Students can also use a Mentimeter poll to vote on how well their group worked together to meet expectations.  The Mentimeter results can be used to guide the discussion, since results are shown live as students input their responses.  The resource linked below, Mentimeter Tutorial, shows how to create a Mentimeter poll.  

Use of 360 Group Work Reflection is an excellent tool for students with disabilities to help them improve their active listening and collaboration skills in group work to develop relationships in the classroom and increase their mastery of concepts.

Group Work Reflections require significant executive functioning skills (including focus, organization, working memory, etc.), written skills, and/or verbal expression skills.  In order to support students with disabilities who have difficulty in these areas, consider the following modifications:

Modifications:

1. Teachers who use Group Work Reflections in their classroom should be mindful of student disability types and needs in addition to formative data when assigning partners and/or group work; ensure that you strategically pair students to support the development of mastery without increasing frustration.  

2. Teachers should consider modifying the evaluation rubric so that students with disabilities can better understand the criteria for mastery within the rubric. Accessible language will allow these learners to engage at a deeper level in reflection and accurately judge their group’s performance.  See the "Accommodated Group Work Evaluation Sheets" resource in the resource section below for more information.

3. If multiple teachers are present in a setting, consider having one teacher work in a small group of students with intensive disabilities to provide them more modeling and more frequent feedback when performing group reflections.

This strategy supports English learners to reflect and grow in their work as collaborators. Using rubrics provides transparent guidance on what it looks, sounds and feels like to be part of an academic team. 

English learners need to read rubrics, listen to and share ideas with peers in order to engage with this strategy. In order to support English Learners consider the following modifications:

Modifications:

1. Differentiate lesson materials. Ensure differentiated learning tools are provided. English learners require scaffolded learning materials and classroom supports in order to learn content and English at the same time. Learners who are not supported academically may feel frustrated and struggle to collaborate. Ensure that learners are working with materials they can understand in order to avoid academic frustration based lack of teamwork. See the "12 Ways to Support English Learners in the Mainstream Classroom" resource in the resource section below for more information.
2. Put English learners in heterogeneous groups that will be most supportive. Consider social dynamics as well as language skills to ensure all learners’ ideas will be included. Consider assigning roles to individual learners. Consider anchoring learners at lower levels of proficiency with learners who speak the same home language to allow for idea generation in the home language. See the "How should ELLs be grouped for instruction?" resource in the resource section below for more information.

3. Explicitly pre-teach vocabulary used in rubrics. Teach rubric vocabulary in context, e.g., provide example scenarios through video, role play, text etc. Consider posting group work vocabulary in a Y or anchor chart for all learners to reference. 

4. Preview and Review. Orient English learners at lower levels of proficiency to the language and scales used in the rubric. Practice using the rubric with an example scenario. When creating rubrics, consider using simplified language for all learners to understand. After using a collaboration rubric for the first time, check in 1:1 with English learners at lower levels of proficiency to ensure comfort and understanding. 
5. Provide discussion frames. When learners will be filling out a rubric as a team, create sentence stems that learners at lower levels of proficiency can use to express their thoughts. See the "Academic Language Functions Toolkit" and the "Classroom Collaboration Discussion Frames (Kate Kinsella)" resource in the resource section below for more information.