I have been thinking about teamwork ideas this week. Here are a few suggestions if you are looking to freshen things up with your groups:
MOST – Students have to piece together the most significant facts. Each student is given a fact each and reads it out and the group has to decide which is the MOST significant. This activity is good for ranking exercises, helps with essays and if they can decide on the most important hey presto – this might make a judgement in a conclusion. Questions that ask students to “Assess the impact of …. on …” are the most suitable for this kind of activity.
COLOUR – Give each student a colour, they need to match this to a task. A good way to get groups into small teams. For example; everyone given the colour green will need to complete task A and so on. You can project on the board colour-coded tasks. This idea is stolen from English who do really well with this kind of activity. Try this for tasks like ratios where you give a SOCI and a SOFP and ask students with different colours to calculate different ratios e.g. blue is the current ratio, red is the acid test etc.
ROAMER – All students are given one fact about the topic, there are some repeats. One student is a roamer and will travel around the room looking for information and then feed back to the teacher until they piece together all the information. If you want to make this more competitive divide in to smaller teams and run activities against the clock. This might be good for topics like quality where there are lots of facts and it can be a bit dry to deliver.
GROUPED – Arrange the room into a series of grouped desks. Each desk has a source of information and some paper. Students divided into teams travel between desks to gather all the information, they get 2 minutes at each table. For example, pricing strategies would work well in this example, one on each table. Students have grids to complete to get all the strategies.
ROUND – Students sit in a circle (or in a normal desk layout) and two enter the circle (or stand up) and these two debate a topic. For example, the pros and cons of Multinationals (MNCs) entering a developing country. If this works well, ask another two students to take their place. Shows argument and counterbalance.
PAPER – give out sheets of flipchart paper and ask students to note down the pros and cons of a topic (might be setting up production in Venezuela, for example) then ask them to rank which are the most important pros and which are the most important cons etc. Then which is the most important factor overall. This again will help with making judgments in conclusions.
I hope that has been helpful
Sarah Hilton