Learning in groups...

Sometime during the third week of summer school, possibly on a Thursday, I taught a lesson on haikus. We'd been discussing poetry that entire week and different literary tools that can be used, like assonance and alliteration. So that Thursday or so I taught them about haikus. We went over some examples, counted the syllables... Then I made them write haikus individually. That went off without a hitch. So then I split the class into two groups to work together: one group of two and one group of three. I assigned a topic, they wrote about it. Simple and straightforward.
Getting the students to work together was harder than I expected it to be. I could understand to an extent. When I was younger I was kind of timid and shy as a student, so if I had to work in groups it was sometimes hard for me to start talking with my classmates and participating in the discussion. But at least I'd get up out of my seat and move to wherever my group was supposed to be congregating. It was a hassle just getting my summer school students to turn their desks even slightly towards each other. I kept on repeating to the students that they all had to contribute to the discussion and decide what point to make with their haikus and the best way to get that message across as a group, but I felt like my efforts were mostly futile.
For the first haiku I assigned, it just didn't work out. A couple of people never really contributed, they just let the other person/people in their group make decisions for them. So I assigned a second haiku and gave the students a little bit more time to write it. Doing this gave me more time to go around to both groups and try to motivate the students who weren't participating to contribute more. The second haiku went a little better: everyone contributed at least a little bit, but still not in equal amounts.
The following week, I taught my students personification and onomatopoeia for one of my last English lessons. They caught on to the material pretty quickly. I divided the class into two groups of three for another group writing activity. This time, however, each student played a specific role in the group. The assignment was to write either a story of 2-3 paragraphs or a poem. In the writing, there had to be at least two instances of each of the following: onomatopoeia, personification, assonance, alliteration and rhyme. They also had to describe the rhythm of their writing sample. So with six requirements, each student in a group would be responsible for two of them. They could decide who would be responsible for what on their own, as long as the requirements were met. Each student had to write his or her name on the writing and list their responsibilities. This time the exercise was very successful. Granted, I still made sure to remind the class that each student had to be participating, and I went around to the desks and asked each person what two things they were responsible for, but I think that holding each student accountable for some aspect of the end product of the activity really made it easier to get everyone to contribute in even amounts and made the activity as a whole much more enriching. I was very pleased.