Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom, Third Edition by

Elizabeth G. Cohen & Rachel A. Lotan


1. Your inquiry question (3 points)


How can purposeful grouping of students and productive transitions
between direct instruction and group work be used to improve students'
engagement and retention of the material?


2. Why you chose this text and how it relates to your inquiry question (7 points)

This text is what I have been using to lay the framework for my inquiry
project. There are so many useful techniques in here, and almost
everything is backed up by sound research. This allows me to go to the
source of most of these techniques and uncover the science behind why
they work.


3. What useful information this text gives you about your inquiry question (10
points)

This text not only lays a strong ground work for creating good group work/
teamwork exercises, but actually discusses the benefits of group work for
student outcomes in a variety of areas which is what I am really interested
in addressing with my inquiry project. The text discusses language
development through group work, the roles and responsibilities that can be
fostered through these techniques, evaluating the efficacy of group work,
and perhaps most importantly the teachers role in a team work classroom.


4. What useful ideas from the text you could apply to your own teaching and how
you plan to apply them. OR, if there is not anything you can apply to your
teaching, explain why the ideas in the text won’t apply to your teaching,
classroom, students, or your school’s community (10 points)

There is so much here! I have only started to scratch the surface of this
topic, and am already finding so much to use in my classroom. Most of
what I have applied so far is the most basic of scaffolding for group work,
specifically in the design of open-ended, uncertain tasks that lead students
to desired conclusions and results. I am still working to design discipline-
based competency demonstrations for students as it is a daunting concept.
I am still only really comfortable using group work in discovery tasks, since
I do not feel as though I have as strong a grasp of group assessment.
However, this text has a lot on group assessments, both formative and
summative, and I am excited to dig deeper.


5. Write the citation for your text in APA format (5 points)

Cohen, E. G., & Lotan, R. A. (2014). Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the
Heterogeneous Classroom (Third ed.). Columbia University, New York and
London: Teachers College Press