Five Things Students Can Learn through Group Work

By Maryellen Weimer, PhD I often get questions about group work. Recently, the question was phrased like this: “Can students learnanything in groups?” And, like faculty sometimes do, this questioner proceeded with the answer. “I don’t think my students can. When they work in groups they have no interest in doing quality work. Whatever the first person says, they all agree with that and relax into a social conversation.” Standing opposite the experience of faculty members like this one is an accumulation of research that strongly supports students learning from and with each other in groups. There’s research and analyses of group learning now reported in virtually every discipline. Here are five things students can learn in groups, all well-established by a wide range of empirical analyses.They can learn content, as in master the material. Whether they are working on problems, answering questions about the reading, or discussing case studies, when students work together on content, they can master the basics. The reason they learn is pretty straightforward, when students work with content in a group they are figuring things out for themselves rather than having the teacher tell them what they need to know.They can learn content at those deeper levels we equate with understanding. I just highlighted an article for the April issue of The Teaching Professor newsletter which reported that the explanations students wrote to justify a chosen answer were stronger after just seven minutes of discussion with two or three students. When students are trying to explain things to each other, to argue for an answer, or to justify a conclusion, that interaction clarifies their own thinking and often it clarifies the thinking of other students.They can learn how groups function productively. In order for groups to function productively, students must fulfill individual responsibilities. Productive group members come prepared, they contribute to the group interaction, they support each other, and they deliver good work on time. In order for individuals to function productively in groups, they have the right to expect the group to value their individual contributions, to address behaviors that compromise group productivity, and to divide the work equitably among members.They can learn why groups make better decisions than individuals. Students can see how different perspectives, constructive deliberation, questioning, and critical analysis can result in better solutions and performance. If students take an exam individually and then do the same exam as a group, the group exam score is almost always higher because students share what they know, debate the answers, and through that process can often find their way to the right answer.They can learn how to work with others. Group work helps students learn how to work with people outside their circle of friends, including those who have different backgrounds and experiences. They can even learn how to work with those who disagree with them, and others they might not “like” or want as friends.Now, it is absolutely true that students don’t learn any of these things just by being put together in groups. Student attitudes about group work are often negative and that’s because they’ve been in lots of groups where they didn’t learn anything other than the fact they don’t like working in groups. Much of the group work used in college classrooms is not well designed or well managed. But when group work is carefully constructed and when teachers help students deal with those group dynamic issues that compromise group effectiveness, students can learn the content and the skills listed above. It would also be nice to be able to end this post with a reference of a comprehensive review of research on group work. I don’t think that piece exists. Research that documents that students can learn these five things is so scattered across the disciplinary landscape that finding it all and then devising some way to quantitatively compare the results is all but impossible. But just because the findings aren’t organized or integrated does not diminish what has been documented time and again in study after study. Students can learn from and with each other in groups.

Startup Thinking In Higher Ed: a conversation with Eric Ries

Just got off the phone with Eric Ries and I’m sure I came off as a total fan boy. His work was a huge influence on my white paper. Anyway, we talked about lean startupin higher education. Here are a few notes: 

Change the Content/Context He made the common argument that universities were designed for a different era, and that even newly launched universities follow the same old model. He talked a bit about this with the Washington Post.

The problem he sees is that this worked with the older social contract: you attend, get degree, get into a profession, and then retire. The problem is that this social contract is being re-negotiated by the job market—and universities are still operating under the old contract. 

Teaching Entrepreneurialism Eric is an evangelist for entrepreneurialism—he argues that this skillset/mindset is invaluable to students. Many people from K-12 and higher education are listening and onboard with this and want to integrate entrepreneurialism — but they struggle with implementation.

 

He framed it like this: you might have this new idea, but then you try to apply the old management practices to create the path for implementing this new thing—and it fails. For example, schools were taking two years to plan ways to embed entrepreneurialism into the curriculum. This just burns through time, money, and effort without including feedback from (potential) students or any experimentation to see what is effective. This is exactly the same problem that kills most startups—they have a decent idea but they can’t get it off the ground without running through all their cash.

 

Liberal Arts Degrees “Teaching Entrepreneurialism” doesn’t just mean teaching people how to run a company or basic business skills—it’s more about creativity, problem solving, communication, and collaboration. Entrepreneurialism isn’t just for science, engineering, and business majors but is also beneficial for liberal arts majors too. In fact, Eric raved about the crucial need for people with these degrees and said they are essential and sought after because they can apply knowledge from different domains and can make cognitive leaps.

 Change “Faculty who embrace change will become the superstars of tomorrow.”Direct quote.

Higher Education is going through a reshuffling—the people at the top don’t necessary want to see that, but the junior faculty who embrace it will become the new leaders. Incumbents are always resistant, no matter the context.

He mentioned the music industry several times. The distributors didn’t want to accept change and those who did wasted too much time, money, and energy on concepts that consumers didn’t want. So the power shifted from the incumbents to Apple. iTunes was a startup-like idea that became the new domain because they developed a new business model.

Just like music, higher ed is valuable, people want it—just need to consider new models. The schools that do so will be the ones that thrive.

 Lean Startup – not just for startups He mentioned that all types of organization are using his approach: Fortune 500s, non-profits, federal and municipal governments, etc. (See, it’s not a stretch for libraries.)

He recommended a video on his blog that highlights several instances of Lean Government. I’ve watched half of it so far and its pretty amazing stuff. The Health Data Initiative is cool.

 Implementation in Higher Education Implementation faces the same challenges everywhere in every environment—higher ed is not unique. But the solution is to create the conditions that support entrepreneurialism.

He feels that there needs to be a change in perspective from “I’m going to educate these thirty students in my class” to instead focusing on educating “the world.”

 His key suggestion was to name a team of people to be the Entrepreneurs of the Enterprise. These folks needed to have the freedom to explore. They need to be taken out of their existing roles and responsibilities and allowed to experiment. He feels that most faculty are not change-agent types and therefore you need a dedicated group within the university.

Eric mentioned that he knows many academics and that they fear getting fired. Even if they have new ideas that are aligned with the university’s mission or are focused on service to students — that there is adversity to rocking the boat.

 He believes the culture is focused on keeping department chairs and other administrators happy (he actually said a culture of ass kissing) and that it is very similar to what he sees in large companies. It’s all about keeping the middle managers happy. And middle managers are paid to keep things running, paid to keep the status quo. They are not the ones best suited to usher in disruptive changes.

 He suggests that a university form a center or institute with a new mission and new metrics—that can work outside the existing framework. Free from the context and consequences that others face for disrupting the status quo.

When I asked him what happens next—he said the center would spin off and form new startup centers bringing in new people to work in new ways—and that this process would continue to expand and that over time the organization would evolve from the legacy system that current exists into a more nimble and dynamic entity.

He emphasized that such a center would need to discoverwhat needs to be done while things are in motion—rather than taking two years to write a plan, go through a nominating process, and figuring out how to bring everyone else along.

 To sum it up: universities that are bold enough to seek a new entrepreneurial model will become the ones that everyone else wants to emulate in the future

 June 7, 2012, 8:03 pm

By Brian Mathews

What Teachers Need to Know about the Lean Startup Model

This is for any educators out there interested in participating in DC Startup Weekend EDU this weekend or any others in the future! I plan on continuing to add to this Ed Tech Glossary, so please let me know if I’ve missed something or an idea needs clarification.

Though an experienced teacher and administrator, I was a complete novice when I joined a founding startup team. I didn’t know lean startup from Lean Cuisine. Customer validation was making sure to get my parking validated at a restaurant in Inner Harbor, and an MVP was the “most valuable player.” I suspect that many other educators interested in entering Ed Tech are coming from a similar place, so I’m creating a glossary of some Ed Tech terms, starting with the lean startup concept. For those of you who plan to participate in an EDU Startup Weekend, the founders and many participants advocate a lean startup approach to creating a business, so it’s useful to understand the concept.

Lean startup model: Eric Reis turned his blog into a recently published book, The Lean Startup, which was #2 on the New York Times Bestsellers list. (Inc. Magazine featured a condensed version of Reis’s book if you want further reading.) Essentially, Reis developed a business model that encourages startups to find out as quickly as possible whether or not the business idea/product/service is viable. The path to achieving this learning is to create a rough version of your product that goes into a cycle of testing, iterating, testing, iterating, testing, and iterating until the product is viable. An important part of this process is early and frequent customer validation. The lean startup model came out of a concept in manufacturing where small batches are created so that there is minimal loss of time and money if the market isn’t interested in that version of the product. The same lean process works well applied to technology too. When creating a web-based tool or an app, you can create a mockup to garner feedback without building the actual product or feature, for example.

Minimally viable product or MVP: This is not the same as a prototype! In the Lean Startup model, the goal is to create a test the smallest piece of a business to see if there’s a market for it. Reis defines the MVP as “that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” Essentially, you’re looking for the minimum set of features needed to learn from your early adopters because you want to learn early what users want and don’t want. It limits spending time and energy on products that no one really wants. Most teams try to develop a minimally viable product during a startup weekend, not the whole business. It looks great to judges if you’re able to validate your idea/product during the weekend. You may be asking, but how do I do that?

Customer validation or validated learning: There are a number of ways to learn about your customers and what they like and don’t like about your product/service. There’s also a big difference between what someone might say they like and what they’re willing to buy or do. The best validation is showing that customers/users will in fact want your product/service and be willing to pay for it.

You first want to see if there’s any interest. For example, if you already have a free product but are curious if people would pay for some additional features, you could add a button to your site that advertises the new version (which you haven’t built yet!). If a number of users click the button, then you have begun validating that customers are interested. If no one clicks, then all you’ve wasted is the time to develop the concept—you haven’t spent excessive money and time on something no one wants.

During a Startup Weekend, you’re likely to focus on establishing general interest in your product or service, and if you’re lucky, getting some users to act. There’s not a lot of time to build significant traction. One way to establish initial interest is to create a landing page.

Landing page: To test the viability of an idea, a single webpage is sometimes created to see if anyone will sign up for the product/service. There are several pre-built free pages out there. I’ve used and liked KickoffLabs as well as Launch Rock. What’s great about these programs is that they provide data: how many times the page was visited, how many visitors were unique, how many actually signed up. (There are some great programs with more bells and whistles for when your business grows and you need to track more complex user actions. At LessonCast, we use MailChimp).

Here’s an example: I joined the team TeenStarter at Startup Weekend EDU in Seattle. The concept for this youth-only site was to provide both advice on creating a business (how to pitch, how to develop an idea, how to market) and to provide a platform for students to pitch their ideas to get seed funding (micro-financing for teens). Our hypothesis was that a student would post a video pitch and then use social media to send it out to his or her network. Friends of friends might also contribute, until the student received the money he or she needed to launch a business or community project.

Here are the steps we took to validate the concept that weekend:

1. We created a landing      page ( http://teenstarter.kickofflabs.com/) and used social media to blast to contacts      of everyone on the team. (KickoffLabs showed 73 unique views and 17 users      signed up.)
2. Again using social      media, our team sent out a request for any teenagers who had an idea to      pitch. (One 13-year-old relative of a team member uploaded a video late      Saturday night!)
3. Once we had the site      minimally functional, we posted the teenager’s video pitch and at uploaded      a PayPal donate button. (Our featured teenager needed $60; $40 was raised      before final pitches on Sunday night. She had the rest the next day!)

For a Startup Weekend, this exercise demonstrated a good conversion rate, and was a fairly solid proof of concept! You shouldn’t expect to get this far on most weekend projects.

Conversion rate: It’s one thing to get users to your site; it’s quite another thing altogether to get them to act/buy/participate. For example, if you send out an email directing folks to a landing page, the first conversion rate will be how many viewers actually click on the link to that landing page. Then the next level of concept validation is how many of these users actually sign up. It’s possible to have more levels of increased engagement beyond this, of course. Each increased level of engagement provides more validated learning about what customers will do. In the Teenstarter example, one measure of a conversation rate would be that out of 73 people who viewed the landing page, 17 actually signed up by providing their emails.

There are other ways to validate what your customers like: interviews are often used.

Interviews: Interviews are a great way to gather information during and after a Startup Weekend. Just because you are an educator does not mean that you should assume that you know what all educators will want—still take the time to get feedback from other teachers and administrators. Other participants, organizers and mentors can help you get in contact with people outside your own educator circle. Asking educators on other teams is one good method to gather some immediate input. Showing two or three versions of a product works well to provide you with specific feedback about features.

Mockups: Remember that you do not have to create a full product to get feedback. A mockup can provide the same information with much less time investment. I learned how to use Balsamiq (free trial period!) at one Startup Weekend—it’s great for creating a design of a website or iPhone app.

Traction: Once you’ve validated your concept, you next want to build traction, something that’s unlikely to occur during a Startup Weekend because of the condensed timetable but definitely an area of focus as you move your business forward. Traction means building a set of early adopters and being able to get those adopters to do something. For example, if you’re building a community-based site, then your traction would be connected to how many users are interacting on your site. If you’re selling a product to schools, how many schools have signed? If you’re interested in investors, then they will be interested in your traction.

When you’re at Startup Weekend, learn as much as you can from other participants and mentors about other effective ways to develop your concept into a viable business!

Posted on October 28, 2011 at 7:58 pm

Author: Katrina Stevens 

About the author

Katrina (@katrinastevens1), Community Developer for LessonCast Learning, has over 20 years experience as a district leader, professional developer, principal, adjunct professor, consultant, academic dean, department chair– and throughout all of these roles—a teacher. She has worked in public and independent schools, from elementary through higher education. In Katrina’s recent role as ELA STEM Supervisor for Baltimore County, she led district-wide content literacy and transdisciplinary instruction initiatives to help prepare the district for the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). She also spent three years in Bermuda establishing a gifted and talented program through Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth.