 Groups are key and they provide a venue for students to really try out their ideas and test them with each other and critique them and see if they're consistent with evidence or not. So any learning environment that can facilitate this group interaction is going to help. I think all of us do a version of this but on the very first day because we will be asking students to share their thinking even if they're not sure that their thinking is correct. We do group norms. So I teach both the physics and the geology. I let them play around a little bit with the curriculum, maybe the first activity and they're asked to get up and share their thinking and so after they do that once I say okay so thinking about how that felt where you had to share your ideas, how do you want this classroom to be? How do you want your colleagues to behave? How do you want to behave during the quarter? And so we record everybody's ideas about needing to have a safe space to present their ideas that there should be mutual respect, whatever. So all of that is written down on a big piece of paper and hung in the room. So there'll be Science Education 201 norms or Science Education 202 norms, whatever. And it's a list of requests for how everybody should behave. And so if this doesn't happen very often but if it does where people are starting to feel uncomfortable, like they're feeling made fun of or something or they're feeling like they don't want to talk because they're uncomfortable, we revisit the norms and say okay so it's something not working here and so we have a class discussion about how to make it a safe space to share thinking. So that has to set the stage for all of this collaborative work. A lot of the collaborative work takes place around whiteboarding. So students will do some kind of activity and then they'll be asked to develop their understanding what that means conceptually. And so students will be working in their small groups, groups of three, and they'll be asked eventually to share their thinking with the rest of the class and so they'll have to write their ideas on a whiteboard. And then each group is doing the same thing and so there'll be a particular prompt where multiple groups will stand up with their whiteboard and share their thoughts. In my classroom I ask that everybody speaks if their group is presenting a whiteboard and it's a group of three that each person has to say something, has to add something. So often while they're preparing their whiteboard someone will say okay you talk about this part, you talk about this part, you talk about this so that when they stand up everybody has something to say so nobody can shrink back into the background. And periodically I think many of us do a version of this where I think that we all change up our groups several times through the quarter and before changing up those groups I will give a self and peer evaluation form and part of that is asking the student to look at those norms and to say okay what have we done well in this class and then what can we work on and they commit to writing, they commit to that in writing. And then they're asked to set a goal for themselves about how they will work with their next group, how they'll improve and it's all related back to those norms. So it's a way to keep coming back to the norms on a regular basis throughout the quarter instead of waiting for a problem to happen and for students to really think about how they're interacting in their groups. Yeah working in groups presents challenges, I think it has many strengths, I think many people are able to blossom in groups but there are also challenges and they include making sure that the students are all on task and don't get distracted and a lot of times it just boils down to showing up there and asking pointed questions about the task at hand. Not necessarily what you're doing but more positive with what are your opinions on this matter, and sometimes just showing up nearby it's enough to kind of keep them on task. Sometimes there's personality dynamics and usually those are minor when it becomes a real issue, really some matter of talking to the students individually and away from everybody and just talking with them sincerely and candidly about what needs to happen. What I find really helps and I think is the most important part is you want to motivate them, you want to praise them for the good work and I think we all like to be told that we're doing a good job, particularly when it's sincere and particularly when it's specific about what we're doing well. So every day for example I like to tell the students what I like or what they did great and I'm specific about what it was. And I also mention when things are not going well what needs to happen. So they know that when I tell them you're doing great for this and this reason I'm being sincere about it. So I think it really helps a lot.