Guidelines for Small Group Teaching

Techniques to Enhance Small Group Discussions

Goals of Small Group Teaching

Small groups are not ideal for distributing information, but they are helpful for students to develop their understanding of concepts and to acquire or improve strategies and approaches to problems. To achieve these higher-order thinking and learning activities promoted by small group teaching, it is helpful for the student to engage in meaningful communication directed towards a goal or set of goals. These higher-order thinking skills (e.g., application of concepts and principles, problem-solving, etc.) are the primary objective of small group sessions.

Guidelines for Small Group Teaching

• Keep the learning process moving. Omit no phase, and take each phase in an appropriate sequence. Guide students to do their own reasoning and help them apply their current information at every stage of the learning process.

• Probe students’ knowledge. Ask questions until students have brought out all they know (recognize when you have reached that point), which often is more than they realize. Why? What do you mean? What does that mean? Why did you say that? How do you know that is true?

• Avoid expressing an opinion concerning the correctness or quality of any student’s comments or contributions. Even saying "that’s a good question" may indicate that any questions not followed by that statement are "bad questions".

• Avoid giving students information that they can and should obtain elsewhere.

• Make sure that all students contribute to the group’s discussion. Decisions should be a group process, not just the decisions by the most self-assured and outspoken members.

• Prevent discussions from being directed toward the group facilitator. Do whatever is necessary to get the students to talk, discuss, and argue amongst themselves. What do you think?

• Keep the level of the discussion questions somewhere between boredom and hopelessly over-challenging, starting at the simplest, most widely known and progressing toward the more difficult, less widely known.

• Recognize potential interpersonal problems in the group and intervene, if necessary, to maintain an effective group process in which all members contribute. When the behavior of the group or an individual in the group begins to adversely affect the group process, the group should address their own problem.

• Continually monitor the progress of each student in the group. Watch and obtain assistance for any students with learning difficulties in reasoning, comprehension, verbal expression, and information retrieval and organization.

Techniques to Enhance Small Group Discussions

Taken form Gelula, M. H., (1997). Clinical Discussion Sessions and Small Groups. Surg. Neurol. 47, 399-402.

The following six points are found by clinical faculty to be effective and easily employed:

1. Goal Orientation 
   Have a goal for the session. The goal may be simple or highly refined. Goals provide direction and focus for the students and the instructor.

2. Extract Yourself From The Interaction 
   To be truly student-centered, the focus must remain on the students and not on what or how much the instructor knows. It is usually more comfortable to provide information rather than facilitate a discussion. However, the purpose of small group work is to assist the learning in acquiring knowledge, skills, and behaviors by directing involvement, not providing information. By remembering this throughout the session, you will be able to extract yourself from the bulk of active learning process.

3. Identify Both Quiet and Dominant Students 
   Both quiet and dominant students are common to the small group process, but they need not cause excessive problems.
   
   To deal with outspoken students you could (1) redirect discussion to another person or another topic, (2) reframe their comments, making them viable additions to the discussion, or (3) break down the group into still smaller task groups.
   
   Quiet students appear to be listening, actively thinking, and forming ideas. As a facilitator, your role is to pull out this thoughtful product for the group discussion. To successfully integrate quiet students into the discussion: (1) request that each student in the group respond to a direct question; (2) ask the group to participate in a "whip," where each member must provide a response, and; (3) just as with the outspoken students, break down the group into smaller task groups.

4. Concrete and Personal Examples 
   Most learners, except for more experienced students, lack the clinical opportunity to make comparisons of the case under discussion with other clinical material. As the instructor, you can be ready to provide cases, problems, and anecdotes from your own experiences by: (1) bringing medical images (e.g., CT scans, MRI, photographs, etc.); (2) providing a letter from a patient, HMO, hospital, etc., and; (3) copying parts of your Progress Notes.

5. Questioning Skills 
   The facilitator of a small group discussion is required to be a good questioner, with open-ended questions generally being preferred over closed-ended questions.
   
   Example: Open-Ended Questions have no expected answer and therefore do not limit discussion. This type question promotes more complex thinking.
   
   Example: Closed-Ended Questions typically have an expected response. For this reason, a closed-ended question is not as beneficial in a small group session as an open-ended one. The closed-ended question is useful when specific information is needed to advance the group discussion.

6. Advanced Organizers 
   After completion of a session, the instructor can use advanced organizers to prepare the students to think about or to organize their readiness to think about something new for the next small group discussion. Two examples of advanced organizers include: (1) requiring students to find relevant articles for the next group session and; (2) having students be prepared to describe a relevant story about a patient they have encountered.

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