Struggling with group work?

I guess that every teacher has had to endure the frustrating experience of wanting to do something really different and then realising that it turned out rather disappointing. Motivated by enlightening inspiration and magical revelation,  you prepare some brilliant group activity, you bring the material you spent hours preparing and then... nothing! 

Group work, project development and class discussions are not something students like to do. But why? They always complain they would like to step out of the ordinary and do something really different. 

The problem is that they generally do not like to speak in class. Teachers have to realise that students sit there mainly because they loose points for attendance if they don't. Since they do not want to have something as trivial as that influencing  their final mark, or because they realise that attendance points are easy points to make, they come to class and they just sit there. How frustrating that is!

My experience has shown that in each group of students, there is usually one student (or if I am lucky, two or three of them), outspoken enough to participate and willing to say something. Yet, most often, they are willing to say something only when I call out their name. In other words, the only way to achieve at least some sound of them is to have each student do a sentence or provide an answer in some exercise. It is difficult to get out of the old-fashioned approach where the teacher calls out a student, asks a question and the student is literally forced to say something. Bottom line, learner autonomy suffers and no independent learning can be furthered. Group work seems out of the question.

Anyway, there are ways. A very good activity I have had quite some success with is a group task I call "The trial". It is suitable for any level and for any setting. The main idea is that the teacher chooses a topic, any topic, and puts it on trial. This topic could  (or should) be related to some content in class. My experience proves that boring reading topics may be turned into rather interesting material when the students are challenged to prepare for "The trial".

The students are divided into three groups: the defence lawyers, the prosecutors and the judges. The first two groups, the lawyers and the prosecutors are each instructed to prepare two sets of information: 1) arguments they would use to defend/ prosecute the subject matter on trial and 2) arguments they would use as replies to accusations and points stated by the opposing party. The third group, the judges, should prepare a list of anticipated arguments and be ready to come to a verdict based on whether their anticipations have proved correct or not. The role of the teacher is to be an arbitrator, who will try to keep the discussion from meandering and make sure that all arguments are fully explored before a new one is introduced.

Topics I have tried out so far, ranged from television to the death penalty. For instance, when my students did the death penalty, I instructed them to prepare the arguments as explained above. They had a week to prepare for the task and they were allowed to use as many sources as they could find - preferably online reading resources. I instructed them to take a look at resources, such as the Criminal Code of the Republic of Serbia, the Act to Introduce the Code of Crimes against International Law, International Criminal Law in Germany and United America Criminal Code. As it was a group of 24 students, there had to be eight students in each group. In order to have each of them prepare at least something, I divided the topic into eight subtopics so that each of them would have to prepare one aspect.

The subtopics were as follows:

1) death penalty in the legislation in Serbia

2) death penalty in the legislation in international law

2) death penalty throughout history

3) death penalty in practice in Serbia

4) death penalty in practice in the international setting

5) the issue of human rights

6) the level of effectiveness of the punishment

7) the possibility of rehabilitation of offenders who have escaped the death penalty

8) What when somebody is executed and then discovered innocent?

I had planned a ninety-minute session for the activity but it turned out that we could not explore all the arguments in one session so we decided to take up another one the following week. 

Now, the results were encouraging. Since each student had to focus on a very narrow topic, they prepared very well for it. In class, I asked them to sit physically divided from each other. In other words, I had the opposing parties move their chairs to two opposing walls, while the judges took their places at the wall in between. I then called out the first student from the lawyer group and asked for the argument regarding the first subtopic. After having stated their point, I asked a student from the prosecutor group to reply and to propose a new argument in line with the information they had prepared at home. Then the lawyer student could reply to the newly-stated argument. Then I asked the judges to come to a conclusion regarding the first subtopic based on the merit they could identify in the opposing arguments and replies. After that, we moved to the second topic. As expected, the most heated discussion was brought about with the issue of human rights and the level of effectiveness of the punishment. That is exactly why we had to plan a new session so as to cover the last four topics, which then, not surprisingly at all, took us another ninety-minute session. The follow-up I came up with after the first session included a short summary of their points of view. I waited with the assignment after the second session was over and I was surprised to find out that each of them submitted a summary. Never before had that happened!

My conclusion was that there are two points that turned this particular task into a successful activity: 1) the preparatory step was linked to rather narrowly defined subtopics so that each of the students had a clear representation and expectation of the task in class and 2) I controlled the discussion so that they could not deviate from what they had prepared. In other words, the prepared list of subtopics was both an agenda and our anchor to hold on to in case of insecurity, stage fright and similar reasons leading to possible failure.

I am not sure whether an activity like this could and should be planned more often during the semester. The predicted scope of classes might make it rather impossible as other aspects and segments in the syllabus would suffer immensely. Yet, I am positive that two classes per semester (maybe even four) should not harm the course. Quite on the contrary, considering the benefits of "The trial", I would gladly substitute some of the boring activities in my Legal English course more often.