Livre d'Or

I absolutely agree that group skills need to be explicitly taught, you can't just tell students to work together and hope they'll magically learn to be proficient. And that includes teaching skills for dealing with exclusion and other social problems, or at a lower level, the teacher being willing to intervene if needed.

It's kind of delicate for the teacher to downplay the importance of an assignment! Definitely a particular piece of work shouldn't be sold as life or death, and part of my mission is about education for people who do in fact have more important stuff in their lives than getting good grades. I feel it shouldn't be up to the students to search out what exactly is being assessed; at least you can be upfront about how important particular elements of the project are in the context of the course, and let the students decide how important the course itself is.