Guidelines for Working Within Your Group
B. Stone, ELA
I will frequently make cooperative learning assignments that you will complete in teams with each member taking a part of a larger task or with all members reaching consensus about the same task.
Some benefits of working within a group:
  • Often you may learn more easily from one another and enjoy class more when working in teams,
  • Group work helps you practice social skills needed in the workplace such as giving help, requesting help, giving constructive criticism, accepting negative feedback, interrupting appropriately, praising and encouraging,

One important goal in cooperative learning is to learn to work well with everybody, even people who are not your friends, so please don't be dismayed if you are not teamed with your best buddies. Even if you are unhappy with your team's composition, you will be expected to use polite behaviors and to follow cooperative learning procedures. Please arrange for a private conference with me if you are really troubled about your team.
Cooperative Learning Procedures that Make Teamwork Work
  1. At 3 flashes of the lights, the class should be silent and give me your complete attention.
  2. Speak softly and speak only to your own team members.
  3. Do not leave your seat without permission.
  4. Use post it notes for questions that cannot be answered within your group.
Signal that your team has a question by each member raising a hand. Ask the teacher a question only if you know that no one on your team knows the answer. Please do not be dismayed if I do not recognize your team when all hands are not raised, for I must follow the rules by not responding until your team responds properly.
Polite Behaviors That Make Teamwork Work
  1. Use each other's names frequently.
  2. Listen carefully and occasionally use reflective listening to be sure you understand what your team member means.
  3. Do not use "put downs" or discouraging words.
  4. Disagree with ideas without using harsh words. Instead, use phrases like, "Could we look at it another way?", "I'm not sure I understand," and "I don't think that's right."

Name(s)______Date______

Identify each example of Figurative Language from Great Expectations.

  1. “Show me the way he went. I’ll pull him down like a bloodhound” (p. 19). ______
  2. “I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush, getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter” (p. 43). ______
  3. “A frowzy mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewed ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole” (p. 171). ______
  4. “I felt impatient of him and out of temper with him; in which condition (Joe) heaped coals of fire upon my head” (p.222).______
  5. “I never had one hour’s happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death” (p. 302). ______
  6. “It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; mud, mud, deep in all the streets” ______
  7. “I shaded my face with my hands and looked out through the black windows...I saw that the lamps in the court were blown out, and that the lamps on the bridges were shuddering, and that the coal fires in barges on the river were being carried away before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain” (p. 315). ______
  8. “The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, through the glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaft of light between the two-and-thirty and the judge” ______