Kristyn Kamp's "5 Strategies for Making Project Work Time More Productive"--Article Review

As I mentioned in my previous post, group projects are a struggle for me--some students don’t want to work with others, some students want others to do all the work, some students don’t get along with the other students, some students will be off-task the whole time. However, in the real world, we work as groups on a regular basis, and our students need to be taught how to work with others successfully. In her blog post “5 Strategies for Making Project Work Time More Productive,” Kristyn Kamps discusses how to motivate students and provide purpose to group activities. I have attempted these strategies to varying degrees with varying success:

1. Prepare students for working in teams. Kamps recommends providing numerous low-risk opportunities at the beginning of the semester to help prepare students for group tasks such as discussions, debates, and negotiations. She engages her students in a variety of skill-building activities in the forms of role selection and homework review. I also attempted some of these activities, but I believe I need to plan for more explicit practicing than what I’ve been doing. I often forget the purpose for the activity because of the fun nature of the activity or the final product of the activity.
2. Use team leaders as liaisons. Many years ago during one of my first PBL units (I did not realize then that it was), I structured my students’ groups to have a liaison. My classes were tasked with creating an amusement park from Odysseus’s adventures in The Odyssey. Each group had a different land which had to have a restaurant, three rides, and a show. Every day would begin with team meetings, and then the liaisons would come to a planning meeting with me. We’d share our ideas, give each other suggestions, work through problems, and then the liaisons would return to their groups. That year was probably the most successful of all my years doing that project. The students knew their concerns were being heard, and I knew everything that was going on without standing over the groups.
3. Train team leaders. In the back of my head, I have always known I need to train my students to be leaders, but I’ve never been explicit about it. Some students naturally want to be leaders in the group. I can see asking my students at the beginning of the semester what roles are most interesting to them and training them to fulfill those roles. Leaders aren’t the only roles for which they must be trained.
4. Structure team meetings with agendas. I kept saying my students needed to create agendas during the Invisibility Project. We even learned how to create an agenda at the beginning of one class period. However, I failed my students by not following up with it and encouraging them to continue. Because of that, I have a feeling some students floundered and were unsure of their daily goals. I tried to put too much on my students too soon; I needed to hold their hands a little bit longer.
5. Plan frequent opportunities for feedback. Kamps recommends providing multiple opportunities for self- and peer-feedback along the way, as opposed to at the end of the project. This is something I attempted to do on a daily basis, if not every other day. I wanted the students to recognize how their individual products would mesh with other students’ projects and encourage them to rise to the challenge of blending their ideas and writing with students of various writing abilities. I found most students receptive to this; however, I know that some of my students will need to be taught how to reflect and provide feedback. This isn’t always an innate skill.

Kamps’s blog post has provided me an opportunity to reflect on recent successes and struggles with my PBL units, and I can definitely see how I can use her strategies to my students’ benefit. I strongly recommend reading her post to gain more personal insight for your classroom’s PBL units.

Kamps, Kristyn. “5 Strategies for Making Project Work Time More Productive.” Blog | Project Based

     Learning | BIE, BIE, 

     www.bie.org/blog/5_strategies_for_making_project_work_time_more_productive.