Creating a Cohesive Group Experience

From CISEREUPI

Creating a Cohesive Group Experience

This link list issues related to creating a cohesive group experience for REU groups. Suggestions are provided for making the group experience a positive one. We also identify unanswered questions that continue to create difficulty for the group experience.

Managing the Group Research Experience

• Scale down the project. Students need to feel that they have accomplished something meaningful. If the topic of the project is too broad or too advanced, students in the group may feel lost or too embarrassed to admit that they don't fully understand the problem they are addressing, which can lead to tension within the group.
• Provide opportunities for group peer review. Even if students work on individual projects or if your site supports multiple groups, it is important to get all students/groups together on a regular basis to present their work and evaluate the work of others. Students need learn how to present their work and to not be afraid to seek input from others. Students also need to learn how to give constructive feedback to others.
• Students should be physically located together. If possible, locate students in the same office area where they can communicate on a daily basis and help each other with the technical issues that arise.

Unanswered questions:

• Uneven academic backgrounds. Getting students with varying technical backgrounds up to speed on a project is still a difficult problem that can cause tension within a group. One suggestion from the Math REU panel was to have the whole group interact for a week and observe the personalities and experience of the different students. Then assign them to projects where you can pair less-experienced students with more knowledgeable students who are also good mentors.
• Different social/ethnic backgrounds. It is also difficult to deal with students that cause group problems due to different social and ethnic backgrounds.

Managing the Social Experience

Before Arrival:

• As soon as the cohort is finalized, send everyone their contact information together with information about local activities, public transportation, campus and city/town maps, etc.
• Encourage the students to create their own Facebook page (before coming to the program) without faculty intervention. If the page is put together by faculty it would be probably less successful.
• Alternatively, collect basic contact information including a picture and one-two "interesting facts" about each student and put them up on a password-protected web page (e.g., wiki).
• Collect emergency contact and insurance information from each student (perhaps this belongs in logistics, but it is important if you are going to have field trips and outings).

At the Start of the Program:

• Have social activities early in the program. Make the very first activity compulsory and the rest of the activities voluntary.
• Social activities can be combined with program-related activities. Examples include beach cleanup ending with bonfire, collecting data at a field location, visit relevant industrial or government research labs, visit a museum, etc. Include some research or mentoring activity within the trip (to avoid problems with accounting)
• Food is a great bonding medium. Examples: Have an opening barbecue or dinner party.

During the Program:

• Continuing the food theme: have weekly lunches where students take turns cooking for everyone, have potluck meals, have lunch-time seminars where food is provided, pick a day for group fun lunches at a local restaurant
• Request volunteer coordinator/s for the social activities and give them a bonus and possibly a budget for the activities (this might not be possible or it might carry liability issues).
• Appoint a minister of fun for arranging social activities
• Create fun activities to break the tension (for example, weekly minute-to-win-it competitions, daily volleyball at 5pm)

At the End of the Program:

• Have a closing meal, barbecue, restaurant meal
• Have students invent lighthearted "superlative" prizes for each other to be awarded at the closing meal

Unanswered questions:

• How to integrate the local students living off-campus with the on-campus hosted non-local students?
• How to engage the local students to support the non-local students with transportation?