A Case for Including Group Projects in Your Curriculum

• the grade-motivated student does the majority of work
• they can be a chore for the teacher to manage
• it is very difficult to create a project that isn’t too demanding for the student’s proficiency level
• dividing the students into groups that will work well together is very hit-or-miss
• creating a fair rubric is challenging – do we grade individually? Do we grade the group? How do we determine who did what in order to provide a fair grade?

Then, along came the La Vampirata Teacher’s Guide.

It is no secret that I think this book is fabulous! Just read here, here, here, and here to see some of the many activities my level 2’s completed with this novel this year. The Teacher’s Guide is amazing from the beginning to the end and is chock-full of ways to expand how you use the novel, including ideas for IPA’s as an assessment at the end of the novel. We were having such a good time with the novel that none of us wanted it to end. So, I decided to give group projects a try.

I won’t go into great detail as to what the IPA’s involve, as they were not my design. But I will share how I implemented them and what I feel made the experience successful for my students.

First of all, these could have easily been individual or paired projects. However, I have 106 level 2 students in just three sections. There is no way everyone could present if they worked in pairs  or individually. We only had 6 days in which to complete the projects.

Here are the steps I used to organize our group projects:

I selected three of the six options in the TG:  (A.) write the next chapter in a sequel, (B.) create a movie trailer, and (C.) create a scene for your favorite character. I expanded each one in order to provided even more options within each category. I created a document that my students used to choose which project they would pursue. We did this on a Friday, so they had time to think over the weekend about their preferred project.

Also, not wanting students to freak out and not be able to produce adequate output, I limited each presentation to approximately one and one-half minutes. That worked out to about 30 seconds of speaking per student. These are level 2’s – they do fabulous story retells and can generate very interesting stories from a variety of writing prompts. But their output abilities as far as speaking goes are much more limited. I wanted to honor that and tried to set them up for success.

Day 1: They looked at the document and made a quick decision on what they liked the best. Right away they had choices they could make.

I divided them into three large groups (who likes A? B? C?) and further divided each large group into smaller groups of three or four. They spent 10 minutes brainstorming. Students wrote their brainstorming lists in Spanish and we talked about them in English.

Day 2: Monday morning we came back and I offered a chance to change projects now that they had time to think about it.  Only a small hand full of students chose to change.

We got to work right away. Students could change groups at this point, but most stayed in the brainstorming groups from the previous Friday.

• Depending on which project they were working on, they then chose which sub-category was going to be their focus.
• Students either filled out a story map or a characterization page. You can download the documents I used here. This document is generic and can be used for any novel.
• They had to take their brainstorming ideas and turn them into complete sentences on the story maps or characterization pages. Requiring complete sentences was essential to working in a timely manner. Later on, they would be able to take their already completed sentences and flesh them out a bit.

Day 3: The next day, we took our maps and characterization pages and used them to begin the serious writing. Some were writing scripts. Some were writing chapters. Some were creating future storyboards. And some were piecing together the most important parts of each chapter to include in their movie trailer. Each student was assigned a specific portion of the text to write/complete.  I did this by speaking to each group and asking which portion each member felt the most connection/comfort level in writing: the beginning, middle, end, or the connections between each portion.

At the end of this class period, I saw that several groups were likely to be ready to present sooner than later. I took advantage of this and offered 5 bonus points to any group that wanted to present a day early. Each person in the group would receive the points on their individual grade.

I kept walking around and speaking to the groups. I did not sit down and grade other papers, work on my computer, or any other task not related to managing the group.

Day 4: This day looked different for each group depending on where they were in the process. Some were practicing in the hallway or making recordings of themselves. Some were still fleshing out their writing. Some were creating visuals (paper or Google Slides) to use in the presentation. But everyone was working and the energy was very high.

I continued walking around, offering advice where needed, checking the occasional grammar error, offering encouragement, and in general telling each and every student how wonderful, intelligent, and creative they were. Producing output in your second language is very scary and I have found that a little bit of encouragement goes a very long way.

Day 5: About 1/2 of each class period was used for groups to practice what they were going to present or to finish what would be presented the next day. The second 1/2 of each period was for presentations.

Day 6: This day went the same as Day 5, with the exception that the students who presented the day before were required to be silent and read a novel or comic from the bookshelf while the remaining groups were preparing to present.

AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Students stayed in the target language, had beautiful visuals to match their presentations, and were super creative!

Here is an example of one of the movie trailers:
Before showing the trailer, each student had something prepared as to why I, the producer, might want to produce this movie.

And here are some students who wrote a “blooper” scene that had to be edited from the (already existing) movie:

In not being forced to produce more than they were able, what they produced was extremely high quality. Missing accents? A few grammar errors? I can live with that! These projects communicated ideas and feelings and a TON of creativity!

I spent so much time interacting with each group, that I knew who had completed their own work and who had allowed the “highly motivated” to complete the work. Out of 106 students, I only had two groups where I saw and documented that everyone did not pull their fair share of the weight. And, as I warned them multiple times throughout the project, their grade suffered greatly.

Based upon this experience, I now have a much more favorable view of group projects. I finally understand that in addition to good project design, successful implementation requires three very clear components:

1. classroom management
2. clear expectations
3. lots and lots of student choice.

I’m not saying that group projects are going to be the main focus of my curriculum, but I certainly will not avoid them in the future.