Group Progress Charts for Young Learners

Written by Malka N. Wickramasinghe, a senior lecturer in English teacher education at Mahaweli National College of Education in Kandy. Her trainee teachers found on their first practicum that they could not hold a class's attention. In mixed-ability groups the stronger pupils did the task while the rest drifted.

Her solution has two parts. First, every pupil in a group has a role - leader, writer, presenter, and invented ones that suit the topic. Then a progress chart on the wall shows each group moving step by step towards a goal as it completes each task, so every pupil is needed to move the group on.

1. Introduce roles over a few lessons until pupils are used to them. Tie new roles to the topic - for a lesson on the environment, a head of department, a media secretary, field officers.
2. Add a "spy" who visits other groups to clear up instructions, then brings the answers back while the group starts on easier tasks.
3. Make the chart: one column for each group, divided into steps, with a group symbol that moves up as tasks are completed. A theme the class knows makes it more exciting - a race, a rescue, a butterfly climbing to a garden.
4. Set tasks that step up in difficulty, from filling blanks and true-or-false to questions that need explanation.
5. Move each group up the chart as it succeeds, and carry the quest over to the next lesson if it runs long.
6. Stress that every group can finish. The chart is there to drive the group, not to crown a winner.

This one is ours - written in and for Sri Lankan classrooms, and it shows. It needs only chart paper and markers, and it answers the practicum problem every training college knows.

It suits Grades 3 to 7 best, and fits the group activities already in the primary and junior secondary Pupil's Books: the book supplies the tasks, the chart supplies the reason to finish them.