DEMO: Teaching the 21st Century Student

1.3.2

Opinion groups

OPINION GROUPS are groups formed by participants who share a com- mon view on an issue, represent a special stance against other groups, or work on a shared topic or task. The assigned team’s task typically in- corporates a defense of a common view or a solution against the rest of the group. There is no prior role distribution within the team, unless roles naturally evolve, each member of the team contributes according to the situational needs. Teams can be flexible in size, but they stay working together from the beginning to the end. The opinion group set-up helps empower the participants to defend opinions and can yield strong and involved interaction.

Opinion groups are easy to organize and flexible in size. Prior to organizing the groups, the teacher introduces the topic or the task and the expected outcome. The groups need to be organized so they reflect the opinion or shared interest, rather than the social climate or cliques. The number and size of the groups may vary from two to many, or the class can be split in a half. Thanks to shared interest, opinion groups are easier to motivate and the individual teammembers’ commitment is likely to be high. Opinion groups are perfect for brainstorming sessions, and thus, adopt- able for many of the activating techniques (Ch. 2). Providing the materi- al or task is distributed among groups by interest rather than by teacher assignment, they are suitable for content analyses (Ch. 3) and follow-up group presentations (Ch. 4.2) of commonly generated results. Opinion groups are excellent training of argumentation skills (Ch. 4.1.3) and a very good preparation for group debates (Ch. 4.3). They can also form among term projects with assigned composition outcomes, such as the argumentative essay (Ch. 5.3.1), decision making essay (Ch. 5.3.5), case study (Ch. 5.4), or research project (Ch. 5.5).

59