Group Work Shmoup work

     I had the opportunity to work in a small group this past week while giving a presentation on reptiles to the 4th grade classes.
     Group work is not usually how I do these lessons, but this time it was necessary because the classes had different activities that they were doing and didn't have a solid block of time that they could all be gathered. It was funny to me that there was one or two kids in every group that set the tone for that group. If the group had serious students in it, they stayed on task, had intelligent questions, made connections between what they'd been previously taught and the animals that were in front of them.
     If the group was full of 'goofballs' the questions were more along the lines of  "where do lizards poop." I say one or two students because that's all that it seemed to take to change the tone altogether. One group had 2 boys that were really interested in reptiles and how reptiles lived and moved etc. The other group I worked with had a student who, I'm told, gets sent to the office everyday for making disturbances to get the other students to laugh.