Small group teaching has become more popular as a means to encourage student learning and engagement. It provides a motivational context for learning through interaction with others and structured activities. Effective small group techniques include think-pair-share activities, guided group discussions, collaborative group tasks, and mixing up group compositions for different learning experiences.

2. Small group teaching has become more
popular as a means of encouraging student
learning.

3.  Motivational context
 Learner Activity
 Interaction with others
 A well structured knowledge base

4. These are open to adaption and
interpretation to suit your individual needs,
and were originally listed by Brown (1997).

5.  This is where you give students a few
minutes to think about a problem or issue.
 Ask them to write down their thoughts or
ideas on a note pad.
 Keep the task specific

6.  Where groups are not too large (20 or so) go
around everyone in the group and ask them
to respond.
 Try not to make the round too daunting by
giving students guidance on what is expected
of them.

7.  Ask students in pairs to speak for three
minutes on a given topic.
 This pair-work can then feed into other
activities

8.  Give pairs, threes, fours or fives small timed
tasks which involve them talking to each
other, creating a hubbub of noise as they
work.

9.  This can be a valuable way of stimulating
creative free-thinking and is particularly
useful when looking for a solution to a
problem or in generating diverse ideas.

10.  This is the term used to describe activities
undertaken by groups of students working to
a brief under their own direction.

11.  Start by giving students an individual task of
a fairly simple nature such as listing
features, noting questions, identifying
problems, summarising the main points of
their last lecture.

12.  This method can be useful for managing
students who are dominating a group,
because it gives them permission to be the
centre of attention for a period of time.

13.  Often we want to mix students up in a
systematic way so they work in small groups
of different compositions

14. There is a growing interest in the concepts of
teacher-focused versus student-focused
approach to teaching.

15. In the learning process
through small large groups one
of the techniques that lead to
students more active learning
performance.