The Group Assignment I Wanted for My English Composition 1 Class

As a student, some people might cringe at the idea of a group assignment. If you don't, the chances are that you ended up with a group of people that you trust or you are comfortable trusting other people to complete their part of the work.

From the perspective of a new teacher, I thought it would be interesting to also have my students teach each other something valuable, since everyone learns things in different ways. It is also mentioned in my teaching philosophy that one of my goals is to "foster student agency and collaboration." This group teaching assignment is one way of accomplishing that.

So what did I design, and how did I go about that? Well, you're just going to have to keep reading to find out.

I wish students could get this excited about doing group work together, and that is what I wanted to create.

---

The Inspiration

Before I received the opportunity to teach, I had to take a Teaching Composition class that went over all of the different teaching pedagogies that we had to know. Early on in the class, we (the students) has to partner up and pick a pedagogy to teach. These lessons happened once a week.

I will give credit to Dr. Sherry Rankins-Robertson for this assignment, since her class provided me with the bones of how I structured my own group assignment. Of course, I wasn't going to have my students teaching each other about pedagogy. So what did I have them teach one another?

If I could've moved my classroom into a circle, I would've, but I wasn't given enough space for that.

The Group Assignment

The group assignment I had them teach themselves was all about grammar and punctuation. Is that a little obvious for an English class? I thought it would be redundant for me to teach grammar and punctuation, but they still needed the skills nonetheless. I believed that it would be better for them to teach each other this concept, since it is something that they have probably been learning all their lives.

I went about this in a similar way that Dr. Robertson went about the class I took from her. Looking through the assigned textbook, which was the Easy Writer by Andrea Lunsford (which I cite in my sources down below), I made a list of what chapters and lessons were included about grammar and punctuation.

This was probably what my brain looked like when I was trying to design my classroom.

After making my notes, I would then assign a lesson a week. An example of what a week could look like would be titled "Verbs and Verb Phrases." After the students pick their own groups, they would be able to pick what week/lesson they would be willing to learn and develop a lesson for.

This was an assignment that I appreciated as an English Composition professor, because then I wouldn't entirely have to teach a lesson on grammar and/or punctuation. Students of today still learn in similar ways that I might have been raised to learn, but there is also a different nuance to it. It also allowed me to see and understand resources that the students of today have (I learned there was much more than just Kahoot as an interactive activity).

I've used a bunch of stock photos here, but this one caught my attention because it has a few brains in the image. I was always trying to pick at my students' brains.

Group Presentation Guidelines

Of course, the entire guideline is a bit more comprehensive in nature, but here is a general outline of what the presentation guidelines looked like on the assignment sheet.

1. Create a 5-10-minute lesson/presentation focused on your grammatical/punctuation issue, using the pages assigned to you from Easy Writer and the other resources at the end of this document.

2. Create a short assignment focused on your lesson concept/grammar lesson. Your assignment should be between 5-10 practice sentences or a half-page paragraph activity.

3. Prepare a list of resources for your classmates to use when completing your assignment.

4. Turn in your presentation, resources, and assignment to me during the class period before your presentation for feedback.

So that gives you a little glimpse into how my brain was working into one of the class assignments I assigned. If you're working on designing your own classroom, I hope it helped you a little. If you have any questions or are interested in learning a little bit more, feel free to comment down below or contact me through the contact page here on the website.

Any teacher dreams of having students appearing to be this engaged.

Sources:

• Dao, Kristi. “About/Teaching Philosophy.” The KMD Creative Co., www.thekmdcreativeco.com/about. Accessed 24 Sept. 2024.

• “Faculty and Staff.” Writing and Rhetoric, University of Central Florida, 5 Sept. 2024, cah.ucf.edu/writingrhetoric/faculty-staff/.

• Lunsford, Andrea A. Easy Writer. 8th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2022.