Team work at NCEA

After experimenting a little with some team work at Level 2 NCEA last year, I got some positive feedback from the students about it. There is some student voice about the first Level 2 standard from last year here.

As part of my inquiry this year, I want to do a lot of literacy strategies to enable the students to achieve at merit and excellence. Within this work, I want to build a lot more group work into the tasks that I set them.
This will give them ~

• confidence
• the ability to help and support each other
• the chance to talk within their teams about the task
• the chance assign roles within the group / team for themselves

When I tried this last year, I received feedback from the internal moderation process which was really good and helpful. That was to make sure that it is really obvious within the group work which part was completed by each student. This is to make sure that their submission for NCEA is clear and their own work.

I am aiming to do this in a couple of ways. When they are working on practical activities together, they will fill in the spreadsheet and indicate what they did on any given day working as the team. When they are working on shared documents online, they are going to colour code their own work in some way, either by using the highlighter feature or by the note feature.

So far it is going well.
When I asked them today what they thought about working in teams for NCEA ~

• It is different to last year
• It is different to the other NCEA classes
• We like it
• It's great

We had a great conversation today about who in the group was the watcher, the bossy one, the neat freak, the organiser, the quiet get on with it one, the loud front man ... they were all pointing at each other claiming it was others in the team.

So far so good.