Groups and sub-groups

In addition to thinking about using sub-groups in larger seminar meetings, you can consider ways of helping students to support one anothers' learning, and to develop their groupwork skills, by dividing them into sub-groups who work together outside of class time. This also enables you to design assignments that would be too ambitious for an individual student to carry out in the time available. Examples that are used extensively in COGS courses include:

Joint preparation and presentation of a seminar paper. Individuals in a sub-group may be required to adopt different but complementary roles; e.g. preparing a one-side summary of the presentation for distribution to the whole group; taking notes of the discussion and summarizing them for subsequent distribution; etc.

Practical mini-projects. Pairs or small groups of students can be asked to design, collect, analyse and present data on an empirical task to the rest of their larger group for feedback.

Whatever you try, the rules of the task and how they are to set about it must be made clear to the students. This is best done in writing, on the course outline.