dynamics

I love situations when I have the chance to teach the same material, or something similar, for several groups. It is always very inspirational and insightful, not only making me understand the material deeper and from more perspectives (students' questions and struggles teach you a lot) but it also sheds light on the importance of the group setting.

I taught presentation skills at the university for two years. In the first one, I had two so amazingly different groups that it took me some time to get used to them (the fact that the classes followed one another immediately didn't help). One was composed of diligent, soft, clever, but timid girls (and some friendly boys). They always wrote long and analytic papers as home assignments, were supportive of each other when they had to give a talk, but they rarely initiated debate or provoked each other in the Q&A session. They were reserved, polite, non-confident, and grateful for my support. At the end of the semester, they gave me a football as a present. The other group, however, was composed, miraculously enough, of active boys (and some loud girls). They had lively discussions, often I was just an observer or functioned as the moderator. They were not always on time with the home work but I didn't have to encourage them too much to provoke and be OK about being provoked in the presentation sessions. In the end there was no emotional goodbye; we rather cracked some jokes.

Later in a semi-academic, semi-business context, something similar happened. I had two small groups, both composed of two young academics, strangers to each other, whom I had to tutor in academic English and presentations. The groups were set according to the results of some previous test, whose accuracy I was quite dubious about, but in the end the pairing proved to be beneficial for all. In one group, the B2 (the lower), there were two quite talkative, opinionated, active students. We had endlessssss discussions about everything, from education, through gender, to pop culture. In the other, I had two shy students, who, although their language competence was strong (B2++), didn't dare to communicate with each other. Usually what happened is that I posed a provocative question, calling for an opinion that can start a dialogue; they replied individually, looking solely at me; and then there came silence. For them, the discussion setting didn't work. What did work was putting the story into the context of a grammatical task, something that had a clear, non-subjective, answer. And at that they were great. It was only after a couple of months that they started to open up for communication, to share their opinion with me, and with each other. Comparing one group to the other, that is pushing free discussion here or stopping debate there for grammar drills, would have been a failure.