Small Design Interventions That Improve Group Work

Strategies

• Choose interaction mode: before selecting an activity, clarify whether the goal is dialogue (exploring perspectives), discussion (analyzing ideas), or debate (arguing positions) (Brookfield & Preskill, 2012).
  • For guidance on selecting the most appropriate mode, see the Center for Teaching and Learning’s article How Do I Choose Between Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion to Explore Challenging Topics?
• Introduce the purpose of the activity to students: when introducing the activity, briefly clarify the purpose of working together. 

Strategies

• Engage students with community-building activities: start with small, low-stakes interactions (icebreakers, paired introductions) to reduce anxiety and help students see peers as collaborators.
• Co-create group norms: provide a short starter list of norms and invite students to adapt or add their own.
• Encourage students to include simple conflict-resolution strategies. The Center for Teaching and Learning’s handout on Developing Class Participation Agreements offers helpful guidance for structuring these norms.

Strategies

Assign roles to students: Clear roles help students understand how they can contribute and make participation more visible within the group. For longer-term projects or smaller groups (ideally four to six students), Belbin’s Team Role Theory (Belbin, 1981; 2000) can provide a useful framework. It groups roles into three broad categories:

1. Action‑oriented
2. Thought‑oriented
3. People‑oriented

A participant can take on multiple roles. Using the Belbin model helps leverage the group’s strengths, address individual weaknesses, and create a balanced team.

While Belbin’s framework offers one way to think about the range of contributions within teams, Barkley et al. (2014) offers several collaborative learning techniques for discussions, writing and problem solving. The Center for Teaching and Learning highlights two such approaches:

• Analytic Teams: assign each student a specific role related to a part of the task, encouraging preparation and accountability.
• Jigsaw Technique: asks students to become familiar with one portion of the material and then teach it to their group, creating a clear reason for everyone to participate

Strategies

• Group formation: Group size and composition influence participation. Groups of three to four students often allow everyone to contribute without conversation becoming fragmented. When appropriate, mixing students with different perspectives, backgrounds, or strengths can support more thoughtful problem-solving. Align group composition with the goals of the activity rather than leaving it entirely to chance.
• Normalize the group challenges: Many students assume that productive collaboration should feel effortless. When confusion or disagreement arises, they may interpret it as failure. Briefly acknowledging that group work can involve uncertainty or competing ideas can help students focus on resolving the task rather than disengaging. Simple prompts such as “If your group gets stuck, pause and decide together what the next step should be” can help students move forward.
• Use brief reflection to improve the process: A short reflection at the end of an activity can help students identify what worked and what did not in their collaboration. For example:
  • What helped your group make progress?
  • What would you do differently next time?

These reflections can also provide instructors with quick feedback on whether the task design supported productive collaboration and where small adjustments might improve future activities.