Expert/Wanderer

Do you remember what "group work" was like when you went to school? In most non-cooperative group assignments, the strong student in the group will do all the "heavy lifting" of the assignment, while others in the group might simply go along for the ride and not participate much. In true cooperative learning group assignments this does not happen because there is individual accountability built into the activity.

In the Expert/Wanderer cooperative learning activity, students do not know who the Expert of the group will be. Students understand going in that the Expert will be randomly chosen from each group, after student teams of four do research on a particular topic. Usually this research involves reading a section of the text book. Teams perform a "table-read" where each student takes a turn reading a sentence out loud until the passage is completed.

Next, the students have an informal discussion comparing what they thought were the most important parts of the passage they just read. This way students are able to express their own points of view, as well as listen to others. Many learning opportunities are created this way.

Students then construct a descriptive poster that will be used by the Expert when teaching the Wanderers. When all teams have completed the poster, an Expert for each group is randomly selected. The Expert stays behind at the home table while the other three in each group "wander" to all the other Expert tables. The Wanderers take detailed notes from each Expert presentation, and when they cycle through all the different topics, they return to the home table and then "teach" what they learned while they were out wandering. Hopefully all the Wanderers are now Experts on all topics.

As an assessment, all students write a summary of the things that they remember from the different Expert stations. The team with the Expert that best summarizes all the other topics (thus illustrating that the Wanderers took good notes and were good teachers) wins a prize.

When reading these formative assessment summaries, I have seen excellent and consistent recall and processing of the content. Students enjoy the opportunity to move around and interact with their peers. Many students have commented that they hope to do the Expert/Wanderer activity many times throughout the year.