A GPS for group work: providing the best route to a successful group work experience for enabling students

This paper seeks to examine how to support mature aged students to develop group work and self-reflection skills, whilst developing social connectiveness. Ideally, this will enable students to develop skills required to be successful in undergraduate nursing/midwifery studies. We have developed an approach that introduces group work early in Semester 1 to engage our students based upon first year experience (FYE) principles and effective support of learners from low socioeconomic status backgrounds to integrate curricula and co-curricular learning experiences and to create a sense of belonging in the university. By providing students with resources and evaluation tools this will enable student's to develop group work and self-reflection skills to succeed. We also hoped that the broad experiences of the students would be able to help them work effectively in groups. Our premise is to enable group work to be the vehicle for learning not the learning