POSTER B4

Replacing Traditional Sections With Teams-based Groupwork: Remote learning and beyond

Leslie Lee, National University of Singapore
leslie@nus.edu.sg

Traditional sections were replaced with groupwork within private channels in Microsoft Teams. This enabled students to form learning communities that facilitated peer learning and support in spite of remote learning, while connecting students with instructors in more personalized ways than typically afforded in sections, allowing for better, tailored feedback.

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The text and images from the poster below can be accessed in their entirety in the text following the image. An accessible PDF document is also available for download below.

1. Context

• A teaching intervention was implemented in an undergraduate introductory linguistics course that I have been teaching for six years.
• The course typically enrolls 250-350 students, and is taught in a lecture-discussion section format.
• Sections are capped at 25 students, and are mostly run by graduate student teaching assistants.

2. Before Covid-19

• Prior to the intervention, sections were conducted in person, once-a-week, and each section was 45-minutes long.
• Sections involved instructor/TA-led discussions of problem sets that students were expected to attempt prior to the session.
• Attendance was mandatory; students were graded on the basis of their participation in class discussions.
• This model provided a physical space that connected students with one another and with the instructor/TA.
• Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were inherent limitations to this model that were at odds with the goals of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion:
  • Issues with assessing participation
    • Students in Singapore can be quite introverted, so class participation tends to be rather imbalanced: a few outspoken students would dominate the discussions while many others would feel unincluded.
    • Classroom management was particularly a problem for inexperienced TAs.
  • Inability to provide good feedback
    • We were unable to provide detailed feedback that was tailored to students’ individual weaknesses.
    • Introverted students tended to avoid seeking clarifications due to the group setting.

3. Covid-19 and shift to remote learning

• The university mandated a shift to remote learning, which introduced new issues:
  • Given the pre-existing difficulties with managing class participation, the problem would likely be compounded if we were to replicate the existing model in a synchronous online setting.
  • There was also a possibility that students, particularly freshmen, might become disengaged from the learning environment due the lack of physical community resulting from remote learning.
    • The importance of learning communities in online learning has been recognized even before the COVID-19 pandemic.

4. Intervention :Teams-based groupwork

• A Microsoft Team (henceforth “Team”) was created for each section (Figure 1).
• Students in a section formed sub-teams (“gangs*” in the images) of three to four members (sub-team membership was maintained throughout the semester).
  • *Note: the term “gang” is sometimes used in Singapore to refer to a small, close-knit group, without criminal or other derogatory connotations.
• Within each Team, private channels were created for each sub-team (Figure 2).
  • Only sub-team members and the instructor/TAs had access to their private channel, making it a dedicated space for the sub-teams to work in.
  • Students were able to to leave real-time messages on a permanent message board, initiate video calls, and create/edit documents within their private channels.
• Every week, students would create a new document within their private channel and work together on a solution to the week’s problem set (Figure 3).
  • Students were graded on these, instead of class participation – eliminated problems associated with assessing participation.
• Problem sets were assigned after lectures, which were conducted synchronously online over Zoom.
• Students had the flexibility of whether to use the scheduled section time to work on their solutions.

5. Evaluation: Quality feedback and learning communities

• The medium allowed the instructor/TAs to provide high-quality, tailored feedback on each sub-team’s solution, which we were unable to do in the old model (Figures 4 & 5).
• We were also able to address common mistakes in the “general” channel (Figure 6).

• The use of groupwork and the provision of a bespoke space for each group to work in facilitated the creation of learning communities, in spite of remote learning:
  • Besides meeting weekly in their private channels to work on the problem sets (Figure 7), students also met to revise for midterms, demonstrating that their perceived utility of these learning communities was not restricted to the problem sets (Figure 8).
  • We saw much closer interactions between students and instructor/TAs than in traditional sections, with sub-teams engaging us with questions about the problem sets in various ways allowed by the medium (Figures 9-11), both before and after submitting their solutions.
  • Students even asked TAs about their individual assignments in their private channels (Figure 12).
    • Students are graded on a curve and NUS students are notoriously grade-conscious: the fact that students didn’t mind their groupmates potentially benefitting from their questions demonstrates the extent to which they treated their sub-teams as a learning community.

• Drawbacks
  • Graduate student TAs don’t get to gain experience with actual classroom management.
    • Develop hybrid model, with occasional, complementary face-to-face sessions, perhaps for review/revision.
  • ”Sleeping”/uncooperative group mates.
    • Important for students to surface such issues early, so that the instructor can act quickly.
• Conclusion
  • There are benefits to continuing with this model even when face-to-face classes resume.

References

[1] Angelino, L. M., Williams, F., & Natvig, D. (2007). Strategies to engage online students and reduce attrition rates. Journal of Educators Online, 4(2). https://doi.org/10.9743/JEO.2007.2.1
[2] Liu, X., Magjuka, R. J., Bonk, C.J., & Lee, S. (2007). Does sense of community matter? An examination of participants’ perceptions of building learning communities in online courses. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 8(1), 9-24.

This presentation is part of the organized session on Scholarly Teaching in Linguistics in the Age of Covid-19 and Beyond at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. For correspondence regarding this particular presentation, please contact the author(s) at the email address listed above.

Check out our other POSTER panel presentations:

POSTER Session A: Course Design [11:00am]

1. Using a Class Wiki to Facilitate Community and Linguistic Inclusivity (Bjorndahl)
2. Offline vs. Online Modalities in Extracurricular Programming (Lucovich)
3. Diversifying the Field: Activities to make linguistics more relevant (Mantenuto)
4. ADA Compliance and Teaching Linguistics Online: Best practices and resources (Miller)
5. Contract grading in Introductory Linguistics: Creating motivated self-learners (Paraskevas)
6. Course Design Principles for a More Diverse Professoriate (Truong)
7. Rethinking Extra Credit: How gamification can reduce grade inflation and strengthen soft skills (Welch)

POSTER Session B: Learning Activities [11:30am]

1. Podcasting in a Pandemic for Teaching, Outreach, and Justice (Anderson, Bjorkman, Desmeules-Trudel, Doner, Currie Hall, Mills, Sanders, Taniguchi)
2. Interactive Activities for Asynchronous Introduction to Linguistics (Curtis)
3. Team Based Learning and English Grammar: Building community and lowering affect (Launspach)
4. Replacing Traditional Sections With Teams-based Groupwork: Remote learning and beyond (Lee)
5. Journaling About Progress and Errors (Nordquist)
6. Making Online Group Work Appealing Through Wikipedia Editing (Stvan)
7. The impact of Metacognition in Linguistics Courses (Vallejos & Rodríguez-González)

POSTER Session C: Teaching a Specific Topic in Linguistics [12:00pm]

1. From “Hello World!” to Fourier Transforms: Teaching linguistics undergraduates to code in ten weeks or less (Blaylock)
2. Active Learning and Self-regulation in Introductory Syntax (Bunger)
3. All in With Google Slides: Virtual engagement and formative assessment in introductory sign language linguistics (Geer)
4. Fostering Learner Investment Through Objectives-based Evaluation and Structured Independent Research Projects (Nee & Remirez)
5. Teaching Grammaticality with Online Tools (Rapp Young)
6. Ten Trees a Day: How Gwilym the Trilingual Buffalo and Insights from Learning Science Can Improve Syntax Skills (Santelmann)
7. Teaching Teachers Phonetics: The design and implementation of an asynchronous online English phonetics course (Weinberger, Almalki & Olesova)