What are the benefits of small group teaching?

The reasons to send your child to preschool are plentiful but most likely, the top of your list includes encouraging your child’s cognitive and social development. Small group activities are one of the most important ways preschool can help children develop.

In preschool, small group activities, instead of free play or engaging with the whole class, are typically multiple learning stations in the classroom featuring fun and engaging learning activities suited for five to six children. Some of the most notable benefits of small group activities in preschool include:

1. Cognitive and social developmental growth
2. Peer cooperation
3. Interaction with peers
4. Teacher observation
5. Interest, abilities, and support

Cognitive and Social Development in Small Group Activities

Children are still very young in preschool, and they are still very much developing socially and cognitively. Most children function best in a small group environment, as they are less overwhelmed by all the children and all the things to explore.

Small group activities create a more approachable way for all children to interact with one another and the teacher. These activities present an opportunity for preschoolers to use language skills to interact and accomplish a task with their peers.

Peer Cooperation in Small Group Activities

By working in small group activities, children work with their peers towards a common goal. Preschool-age children will inevitably run into hurdles working with each other. By overcoming these bumps with the teacher’s help, they will be developing cooperation skills, conversation skills, learning how to work as a team, and work on sharing and compromising.

Interaction with Peers in Small Group Activities

Preschoolers sometimes struggle with making friends, but children are encouraged to play and interact with kids whom they do not typically interact with by working in small groups. This structured interaction creates a more inclusive environment in the preschool classroom and further encourages children’s social skills by encouraging them to work with different people.

Teacher Observation in Small Group Activities

Preschool teachers are more easily able to observe children during small group activities. By working with each small group, teachers can observe a child’s development and behavior while working with peers more closely. This observation allows for better fine-tuning and adjusting an individual’s preschool education to best support them in their unique needs.

Encouraging Children’s Interest, Abilities, and Offering Support in Small Group Activities

By strategically separating preschool children by groups, teachers can allow children to do an activity they’re particularly interested in – trains and transportation, for example. Or, children who are developmentally lagging can be paired together and offered the most support. On the flip side, more advanced children can be together so everyone can receive the support they need.

Small Group Activities at Breakie Bunch

Small group activities are essential to our preschool curriculum at Breakie Bunch because of the plentiful benefits they offer.

By breaking our preschoolers into small groups, we can better observe and encourage children to develop in many ways, most notably socially and cognitively. For more on your preschooler’s development, check out our blog series on developmental milestones for preschoolers.

“More hands make for lighter work.” “Two heads are better than one.” “The more the merrier.”

These adages speak to the potential groups have to be more productive, creative, and motivated than individuals on their own.

Benefits for students

Group projects can help students develop a host of skills that are increasingly important in the professional world (Caruso & Woolley, 2008; Mannix & Neale, 2005). Positive group experiences, moreover, have been shown to contribute to student learning, retention and overall college success (Astin, 1997; Tinto, 1998; National Survey of Student Engagement, 2006).

Properly structured, group projects can reinforce skills that are relevant to both group and individual work, including the ability to: 

• Break complex tasks into parts and steps
• Plan and manage time
• Refine understanding through discussion and explanation
• Give and receive feedback on performance
• Challenge assumptions
• Develop stronger communication skills.

Group projects can also help students develop skills specific to collaborative efforts, allowing students to...

• Tackle more complex problems than they could on their own.
• Delegate roles and responsibilities.
• Share diverse perspectives.
• Pool knowledge and skills.
• Hold one another (and be held) accountable.
• Receive social support and encouragement to take risks.
• Develop new approaches to resolving differences. 
• Establish a shared identity with other group members.
• Find effective peers to emulate.
• Develop their own voice and perspectives in relation to peers.

While the potential learning benefits of group work are significant, simply assigning group work is no guarantee that these goals will be achieved. In fact, group projects can – and often do – backfire badly when they are not designed, supervised, and assessed in a way that promotes meaningful teamwork and deep collaboration.

Benefits for instructors

Faculty can often assign more complex, authentic problems to groups of students than they could to individuals. Group work also introduces more unpredictability in teaching, since groups may approach tasks and solve problems in novel, interesting ways. This can be refreshing for instructors. Additionally, group assignments can be useful when there are a limited number of viable project topics to distribute among students. And they can reduce the number of final products instructors have to grade.

Whatever the benefits in terms of teaching, instructors should take care only to assign as group work tasks that truly fulfill the learning objectives of the course and lend themselves to collaboration. Instructors should also be aware that group projects can add work for faculty at different points in the semester and introduce its own grading complexities.

References

Astin, A. (1993). What matters in college? Four critical years revisited. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Caruso, H.M., & Wooley, A.W. (2008). Harnessing the power of emergent interdependence to promote diverse team collaboration. Diversity and Groups. 11, 245-266.

Mannix, E., & Neale, M.A. (2005). What differences make a difference? The promise and reality of diverse teams in organizations. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 6(2), 31-55.

National Survey of Student Engagement Report. (2006). http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2006_Annual_Report/docs/NSSE_2006_Annual_Report.pdf.

Tinto, V. (1987). Leaving college: Rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Three key roles of the facilitator in small groups