School Placement 3

Critical Reflection 4 – Group Work

Rebecca Carroll
G00391060

Now that I have completed four weeks of teaching practice, I am at the midway point of
my school placement. This is a significant accomplishment for me, and in order to advance as
a teacher, I believe it is imperative that I keep thinking critically about how I teach. After
speaking to one of the other teachers in the school, one of their suggestions was incorporating
as much group work into my lessons as possible. I have been a little sceptical of doing group
activities in the classroom in the last few weeks because I have been worried that it will cause
the students to become too energetic and will make classroom management more difficult.
However, the teachers I spoke to, suggested some ways I could incorporate group work into
my lessons. I took this advice on board and tried to make an extra effort of including more
group work in my lessons this week. 
Group is defined by Cohen and Lotan (2014) as “students working together in a group
small enough so that everyone can participate on a clearly assigned learning task”. It is
apparent that group work has some clear advantages in the classroom. Students have the
chance to develop their social and communication skills, higher order critical thinking
abilities, problem-solving skills, and teamwork skills. It is interesting that the NCCA has
many of these listed as the key skills of the Junior Cycle (NCCA 2022).
I have been attempting to think of ways to include group work into my lessons
throughout the past week. As advised by another teacher, I asked one of my first-year groups
a higher order question and let them work in pairs to develop their response. Students were
obliged to record their group's response on paper before presenting it to the class. I included a
quick quiz at the end of one of my lessons for one of my second-year groups and had the
students work in pairs. The students gave positive feedback on these lessons, and it seemed to
me that they enjoyed working in groups throughout class.
While researching group work as part of a lesson, I learned that group work has been
found to have a positive effect on student with learning difficulties. I found this interesting as
I am always searching for more ways to give all my students an equal learning opportunity,
and so group work will help me cater to certain students. Although challenges may present
themselves while engaging in group activities, with classroom management being a major
factor to consider, I believe it is completely manageable if I remember to keep students on
task and ensure they are communicating well with one another while remaining attentive. It
appears that group work has far more benefits than I ever knew, and I will try to include more
of it in my future lessons. 
 
 

Bibliography
Cohen, E.G. and Lotan, R.A., 2014. Designing groupwork: strategies for the heterogeneous
classroom third edition. Teachers College Press.
NCCA, 2021. Junior Cycle Key Skills [online] Available at:
https://curriculumonline.ie/Junior-cycle/Key-Skills/