Saturday, August 19, 2006

Choosing working groups smartly

In the past, I've allowed students to choose groups to work in by affinity. (They go with their friends -- if they have any.) That doesn't teach 'em enough. Especially since what they're after is the chance to conceive of a business that might have a chance to survive. So this year I'm going to choose the groups myself, and gamble that, in a class of 15 people I can find small groups with skills that go across the board. (In business and industry, you'd really like your working teams to have an assortment of skills, right?) An assortment of skills comes from an assortment of, well, multiple intelligences. Gifts that students may have that are relevant both to multiple intelligences (per Howard Gardner, Intelligences Reframed, 1999) and to in-class group work:
  • good with numbers (e.g. financial estimates) (logic – math)
  • artistic (e.g. marketing, Web design) (visual)
  • one-on-one people skills (e.g. negotiation, interviewing) (interpersonal)
  • group people skills (e.g. presentations, demonstrations) (intrapersonal, cultural, kinesthetic)
  • good with words (e.g. research, writing) (linguistic)
  • organized (e.g. team leader, meeting planner, document setup, support others) (interpersonal, intrapersonal)
Notice that the important skills for this work are interpersonal and intrapersonal. What we have to do is
  1. Find out what their skills are (via a survey?)
  2. Measure the skills (or have them demonstrate those skills in some way)
  3. Group them in a way that matches the skills.
Notice also that I refer above to "cultural intelligence." I use that term to mean the knowledge of the behavior of large groups, or even societies. This is a useful characteristic of (among others) marketers, urban planners, politicians, etc. And it's not on Gardner's list. He's not likely to want to talk to me about it, as he is a world-renowned scholar, but I'm gonna toss the idea his way anyway. Why stop at eight types of intelligence if it takes more to describe us? But that's a digression.

The point is that I'm hoping to get groups to dig a bit deeper for ideas, and back those ideas up more robustly, than I've seen students doing in the past.

Labels:

posted by Ron @ 8:10 PM

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home