Getting to know students is probably the single most important thing a teacher does.  With this information, teaching and learning can go to heights unattainable without it.  If you know the interest, learning styles and experiences of your students, you can tailor their learning opportunities in a way that just can’t be done without this kind of information.

Roles are a key way of creating positive interdependence between group members.  If each role is carefully developed then students will be dependent on each other to complete their roles in order to be successful.  But just assigning roles isn’t enough and while it may be enough to ensure productivity, roles must be much more thoughtfully designed in order to create the kind of equity that I have been promoting in these last posts.  For example, if the roles are time keeper, materials person, reader, and writer, everyone may have a job but their job does not necessarily increase their status in the group.  Time keeper is a classic role that can lead to “social loafing”, relying on others to get the work done.  The role is important for productivity but doesn’t require any participation in the learning activity to take place by that student.

The typical way of developing roles is to break down the project or learning task into parts and develop roles based on the needs of the task.  There is nothing wrong with this as a method.  When you know your students, this method can be combined with the insight you have about your students to create roles that make sense for the individuals in your classroom as well as for the task to be completed.

Let’s consider a few examples.  Imagine that students are working on a math task and you have some students who are story tellers, some that enjoy art, some that are very shy and some that are very active physically.  A possible role might be a person who describes the math concept through a fictional story.  Another might be someone who creates a visual representation of the math concept.  The shy students could be the writers and the kinesthetic students could be responsible for seeing what other groups have come up with when their group gets stuck.  I want to reiterate here in case you haven’t been following the series, that we are talking about a complex thinking task not a group working on a worksheet together.  In this math example, students would not be working on a process alone.  Check out this example from the NRICH site which is a great resource for what I am discussing.  If you have examples of other complex tasks in any subject area or you wonder if something is complex enough, post a comment.  Maybe we can help each other.