Step 1: Groups

 Picking up where I left off at the end of the previous post:

The first thing I needed to do was figure out how we were going to set up the groups for the discussions.  This had to have the flexibility of working for students in class, working for students if we ended up at home working remotely, and working for students who were not at school because they were sick/quarantined.  

So, the decisions that were made:

(1) Groups would change for each unit, and each group would ideally have four students.  This was big enough to have different ideas about how to attack a problem, and small enough to work in a remote setting.  It was also influenced by the fact that there are four main topics in each unit.  More on that in a later post.  

(2) Each group would have their own chat room. We have the GSuite for Education in our district, and Google Chat was perfect for this.  The students could share photos of their work if necessary, and quickly start a Google Meet for just their group without any previous setup needed.  In particular, joining their group on Google Meet worked out really well for the students who were quarantined, and was a good place for the entire group to share information after school and on the weekends. And while we never fully went remote last year, I could see that the chat rooms would have been great in that setting as well.  Also, I was a member of each chat room, and while it did mean my phone was receiving a lot of notifications, it also meant I could more easily keep track of how the groups were doing, how much and how well each member of each group was contributing, and so on.

(3) Each group chose a "table captain".  These were the students to whom the work was actually assigned, and they were responsible for sending the information out to the group and submitting the work done by the group.  This gave the students some leadership opportunities, as well as ownership of the work that was done.  The first unit of the year was a bit rough, but once everyone saw how things worked, it was smooth sailing from there.

With this part prepared, I moved on to creating the platform for working through the discussion exercises.  This will be the subject of the next post.