Putting students into groups for teamwork seems to me to be a very significant element in any course.  If the groups work well everyone benefits; if not the ultimate learning from the course can be severaly damaged, and student satisfaction is also low.  Over the years I have tried different ways of doing it -  letting them choose their own groups (which often leaves the problem of the 'last person to be chosen'), dividing them according to where they are sitting in the classroom (which often mirrors the earlier method), splitting them up alphabetically, and so on.  For three years I experimented by constructing groups that were entirely of one gender - with the fascinating outcome that males benefitted from being in single sex groups but females didn't.  (I can provide more detail on that outcome if anyone wants me to.)

This year I have tried a new approach, and today it was put into practice for the first time.  A couple of weeks ago I asked all the students in my third year option to complete a 24 question personality profile - loosely based on the well-known Myers-Briggs or Margerison-Clark systems, but adapted to the skills needed or group work in my module.  The answers have been scored in five categories - loosely around gregariousness, leadership, openness to innovation, organisation, and 'follow-through' or 'completer' status.  The first task that I have given my class (37 students who I have divided for the moment into 8 groups) is concerned with the changes in Central and Eastern European cities since the ending of Communist rule and the inception of marketisation and privatisation (particularly in the housing market).  In addition to using the profiling information I have also used the results of a factual question they were additionally asked about the countries they have visited.

So today the students have found out which of the eight groups they have been assigned to, and they spent 30 minutes in their groups planning how they are going to work to produce a presentation in a seminar in two weeks time (each group has a different but related topic to work on).  I was delighted to see the seriousness of purpose that they showed in starting off - many of them not having met the others in their groups before. Each group has a nominated leader whose responsibility it is to organise their activities - these leaders being those with the highest score in that category in the profiling exercise. Each group also has members who between them have experienced travel in at least three former Communist states; each also has someone with a high score on 'openness to innovation' since I am looking for interesting presentations that perhaps deviate from the run-of-the-mill. 

For later seminars in the class I - at the moment - intend to redesign the groups using slightly different criteria from the profiling.  If readers of this blog are interested in following these experiments, do let me know and I'll blog about them again later in the semester.