Observing my students figuring out how to canoe on the river this last outdoor education trip has reinforced my belief in the effectiveness of authentic team-building experiences over simulations and co-operative games.
Each morning, I assigned different pairs of students to each canoe. One of the main objectives of the outdoor ed trip is to help integrate the 7th and 8th graders, and the new 8th graders into a cohesive group. Good relationships among the students are necessary to achieve the benefits of the multi-age classroom.
Figuring out which way is upstream and which way is downstream.
It took them a while (sometimes up to an hour on the water), but they eventually figured out how to work together.
And when one of the canoes tipped over — more from overconfidence than from anything else — everyone pitched in to help recover the canoe.
Recovering the tipped canoe.
Then, when the storms came, they pulled together and all the practice paid off.
Paddling through the storm.
No simulation could have matched the experience.
Forging a team out of cold water, thunder, and lightening.
One of the first things we learned at Heifer was the process of group formation. It was also one of the last things they talked about so it must have been pretty important.
The four steps are:
Forming: Students are quite polite to each other when they first get on the balance board.
Forming: When the group first gets together, people tend to be cautious with one another. But because they’re so careful with what they say and what they do, newly forming groups don’t usually get much done.
Storming: Now the barriers start to break down as individual personalities manifest themselves. People start speaking up. A lot. They become less polite. Conflicts arise. People become accusatory. There’s lots of energy, but because of all the conflict, they still aren’t able to get much done.
Storming: Vociferous disagreement breaks out.
Norming: The conflict begins to settle down as the group starts to work out its kinks, as all the individuals begin to adapt to one another. Groups may need guidance to get there because everyone has to stop fighting, but as it usually helps that the group will start to see successes because of successful co-operation.
Performing: A well-functioning group can get a lot done. They’re able to communicate effectively, and take action effectively. Their productivity kicks into high gear and they can accomplish much together.
Norming: The group begins to organize itself. Rules of order are put in place.
Not all groups get through all four steps, and every time the group changes, such as when a new member (like a new student) is introduced the groups will need to go through some version of the four steps as they learn to accommodate the newcomer.
A well established culture will help groups adapt to change. This is yet another benefit of multi-aged classrooms, because a healthy classroom culture eases the transition as older students leave and new students come in.
Performing: Roles are assigned. Balance is achieved (from 2, to 5, to 57 seconds).
Even so, awareness of the four steps is extremely useful because it helps everyone anticipate that there will likely be some conflict, but that conflict is part of the group forming process and will likely diminish with time.
So you should expect, every year, to have to spend some time group building. Two weeks dedicated to orientation and teamwork is what Betsy Coe’s Montessori Middle School program uses. It’s a fair chunk of time to take out of the year, but because good groups can get so much more done, it’s well worth it to build a good classroom community.
PsyBlog has an excellent summary of the research on social loafing, the phenomena where people working in a group work less compared to when they work alone. Because we do so much group work, this is sometimes an issue.
The first research on social loafing came from Max Ringelmann way back in 1913 (Ringelmann, 1913). He had people pulling on a rope, and compared the maximum they could have pulled, based on individual test, to how much each person actually pulled. The results were, kind of, sad; with eight people, each one only pulled half as much as their maximum potential strength. A graph of Ringelmann’s data is shown below. If everyone pulled at their maximum the line would have stayed horizontal at 1.
The relative loafing of people working in a group. As the group gets larger, the amount of work per person decreases from its maximum of 1. Data from Ringelmann (1913)
The PsyBlog article points out three reasons why people tend to loaf in groups:
We expect others to loaf so we do it, too.
We feel more anonymous the larger the group, so we feel less need to put in the effort.
We often don’t have a clear idea about how much we need to contribute, so we don’t put in as much as we could.
This can be summed up in Latane’s Social Theory:
If a person is the target of social forces, increasing the number of other persons diminishes the relative social pressure on each person.
The key is making sure students are motivated to do the work. We want self-motivated students, but creating the right environment, especially by training students in how to work in a group will help.
Make sure students realize the importance of their work; this makes them more motivated.
Build group cohesion; team members contribute more if they value the group they’re in.
Make sure the group clearly and fairly divides the work. Let everyone be part of the decision making process so students have choices in what to do will help them be more invested in their part of the work.
Make sure each group member feels accountable for their share of the work.
A Brief Excursion into Mathematics
Ringelmann’s data falls on a remarkably straight line, so I used Excel to plot a trendline. As my algebra students know, you only need two points to write the equation of a line, however, Excel uses linear regression to get the best-fit line through all the data. Not all the data points will be on the line (sometimes none of them will be on the line) but the sum of the distance from each point to the line is minimized.
Curiously, since the data is pretty close to a straight line, you can extend the line to the x-axis to find out how many people it would take for no-one to be exerting any force at all. Students should be able to determine the equation of the line on their own, but you can get Excel to give you the equation of the trendline. From the plot we see:
y = -0.0732 x + 1.0707
At the x-axis, y = 0, so;
0 = -0.0732 x + 1.0707
solving for x we first subtract the constant, 1.0707 from both sides to get:
0 – 1.0707 = -0.0732 x + 1.0707 – 1.0707
giving:
-1.0707 = -0.0732 x
then divide by -0.0732 to isolate x:
which yields:
x = 14.63
This means that with 15 people, no-one will be pulling on the rope. In fact, according to this equation, they’ll actually start pushing on the rope.
It’s an amazing result, but if you can find flaws with my argument or math, please let me know.
