During topic 3 we were reflecting on how we can make students learning improve using group work and collaboration assignment.
I have to say that “my” group is reallt creative and during the first meetings we came up with a lot of different ideas and angels on the topic.
To try and structure the contributions we decided to use Miro and a technique called “lotus flower” were we could place the main topic in the middle and then like leafs arrange similar topics around the center. You can see our flower here: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lkdyhVU=/
One subject that I personally found very interesting is the use “Cross-curricular learning (or cross-disciplinary). Mainly in projects where students from different disciplines are given a task they have to solve together. Not only does the students require knowledge within their areas, the also need to reflect on their knowledge to be able to communicate it to group members that do not have knowledge in that area. According to my experience this is a very powerful way to make the students reflect on their own knowledge.
An other topic we did discuss was how groups form ans how students (or other team members) tend to take on rolls. According to Dr Meredith Belbin’s research (Belbin, 2004), there are nine main rolls the are quite common to take on by group members which you probably will recognize if you read the definitions.
References:
M Belbin, Book Belbin Team Roles, 2004 – sheffield.ac.uk
Malvina Latifaj
Thank you for the interesting post! The cross-disciplinary learning is indeed quite interesting. I would actually be interested to see how this would work in practice based on your experience, and if it would need a different “design” or extra care compared to traditional learning. I am asking that because even though I believe that this sort of learning has benefits that you might probably not find in other types of learning one can also encounter a lot more threats. Do you think there needs to be some sort of risk management in this type of learning and do you think that the benefits overcome the risks?