How much time should you allot for group work? It depends on task complexity, but you must make some more refined estimates as well. You need to determine the time to devote to group work and the time to devote to all groups coming together to share their contributions.

This latter time may be used for group reports, a whole-class discussion, debriefing to relate the work experiences of each group to the end product, or some combination of these tasks. Group work can easily get out of hand in the excitement, controversy and natural dialogue that can come from passionate discussion. This possibility requires you to place limits on each stage of the cooperative learning activity, so that one stage does not take time from another and leave the task disjointed and incomplete in your learners' minds.

Most time naturally will be devoted to the work of individual groups, during which the major portion of the end product will be completed. Individual group work normally will consume 60 to 80 per cent of the time devoted to the cooperative learning activity. The remaining time must be divided among individual group presentations, whole-class discussion and debriefing that places the group work into the perspective of a single end product.

If you plan both group reports and whole-class discussion for the same day, be aware that the discussion probably will get squeezed into a fraction of the time required to make it meaningful. To avoid this, the group discussion or debriefing for the following class day may be scheduled, so that class members have ample time to reflect on their group reports and to pull together their own thoughts about the collaborative process, which may or may not have occurred as intended. Providing 15 or 20 minutes at the beginning of class the next day is usually enough time for students to have acquired the proper distance to reflect meaningfully on their experiences of the day before, and to learn from them.