Understanding Successful Group Roles

Promoting Successful Student Collaboration through the Use of Meaningful Group Roles

Merely placing students in groups and asking them to work together on a final product usually results in the strongest students taking over the work and the others becoming observers or taking on unchallenging tasks such as cutting, gluing, and decorating, activities through which they do not learn the desired content or develop the target skills and language. In addition to structuring the activity to ensure full participation, teachers should assign clear roles to students that allow students of different levels to access the materials. Roles can be created to have varying levels of complexity and can be provided with varying levels of scaffolding so that every member of a heterogeneous group can find a role that is challenging without being overwhelming. These roles should specify who should do what, when, and how. Although students assuming
In order to design roles, you must first decide what work needs to be done in order to complete the larger task and achieve the learning objectives for both content and language. This body of work is then divided into separate roles, according to the type of work or thinking that needs to be completed. For each role within a group you must specify exactly what each student is expected to do in order to successfully inhabit that role. All group members should be aware of each others’ roles so that they also know what to expect from their group peers. In cooperative learning, roles can be broken down into six basic types: function, learning, resource, perspective-taking, cognitive, and fermenting roles. The content of the activity will determine the types of roles you assign. Please refer to the Group Roles Reference Chart for