Part of what you'll be working on this semester is learning how to plan and organize your work through complex problem solving with a group. Keeping your work organized is important for several reasons - 1) making sure you're not missing any critical information from the problems, 2) making sure that everyone in the group understands each step along the way, and 3) making sure that you understand what happened in the problem when you look back at your work (e.g. for homework or exam preparation). To that end, we've outlined a process below that will help you get through the problems in the class. We recommend that you use this as a guideline, but also feel free to adjust, change, or add to this based on what works best for you and your group members.
Each in class problem will start off with 3-4 conceptual questions that cover key ideas from the readings or offer good discussion points for your group. These questions will serve as a “warm up” and make sure your group is on the same page before jumping into the problem. Your group should write out the answers to the questions the whiteboard, check in with your small group instructor, and then take pictures of your answers. Remember to talk over these questions with your small group instructor before you erase the board and move onto the main problem.
The main problem will typically be a single, complex problem that you will work through with your group. You'll have two whiteboards on your table - you should use one whiteboard for planning and one whiteboard for calculations/work. We'd suggest setting up your planning whiteboard by dividing the board into “Four Quadrants”:
For your calculations board, we recommend setting up a space for a representation (figure - labeled with arrows/origin/diagrams/etc), a plan, and then a space for your work (calculation/explanations). Again, you can play with the format here, but make sure you have picture/plan/work somewhere on this board.