Group work

[liv]

I'm on a mission to redeem group work in education. I expect this to be controversial among many of my friends. So if I'm right and lots of you have terrible memories / experiences of being made to do bad group work, I invite you to comment here and tell me what was bad about it. Do you think it's just awful, or are there problems that might be fixed? I believe strongly that while it can be dire, it can also be great, or perhaps I might phrase it as, there are things that look like group work superficially but are actually great.

Because I'm on a mission this may turn into a more formal research survey at some point, but in that case I'll pose the question in a formal context with ethics and everything. Right now I'm just trying to gather some opinions and not just rely on my own ideas. Plus I am eye-deep in paperwork and I could do with some distraction, so do rant away.

Comments

[jenett]

Most of my group work was unsatisfactory (of the "I ended up doing most of the work and also having to put up with a whole lot of annoying waiting around for people who were not doing their part") but I had one class in my MLIS program that handled it beautifully. (This was in the fall of 2006, so a while ago.)

What he did really well:

1) Expressly discussed the "You need group skills in future jobs in this field, but the way those work in the workplace are different than they are in class. We can fix some of that with some explicit agreements, but we need to recognise that there's an artificial layer of weird here."

Notable differences he brought up being things like that in the workplace if you have persistent issues with someone not doing their share, there are multiple solutions, there are ways to document what you yourself are doing (1:1 with your manager, email trails, etc.) so you don't necessarily get unduly penalised and usually the tasks are more divided by roles so it's more clear what part each person is doing.

2) He split us up into groups, told us we could swap groups after the first round if we wanted. (Almost no one did, because it turns out the other approaches he used work really well)

3) We had *lots* of group projects: I think it worked out to 8 for 12 weeks of class. Most of them were of the form 'make a presentation to the class about X' with supporting materials. (It was a class in collection development: i.e. how libraries select new items for the collection and remove outdated stuff.)

3) The group work grades mattered in the sense that he had to be able to see you were participating - but he cared a lot less about whether something we tried was 'successful' or came off perfectly than that we had a chance to try things out. And told us that, repeatedly.

I don't remember that we had to do the "how much did people participate" thing routinely (though there was a way to signal if someone really wasn't pulling their part as an optional question) but he did ask for brief reflection on what we'd tried that was new for us this time, and how we thought the presentation went, and what we'd try doing differently in future for something like that.

We sort of started at a default B for this (on the standard US system where a B is perfectly competent but not brilliant) but taking risks even if they didn't work out (but we thought about them after, applied what we'd learned in future weeks, etc.) got us better grades.

He told us that he did this expressly so we could try out different approaches of doing the group work, and take some risks on presentation styles. He let us know after each presentation how we'd done (in plenty of time to adjust for the next one.)

The core of our total grade was based on other individual work: you would damage your grade if you ignored the group work, but not if you gave it a fair shot even if it wasn't successful on an absolute level.

4) He also let us divide tasks up as suited the group - if that was uneven, but everyone was okay with it, that was fine (this is much more normal for job things).

If people wanted to do the same tasks week to week, that was fine as long as it was fine with the group. If people wanted to swap up and try a new skill, that was fine. (He encouraged us to try swapping up occasionally, because it was a low-risk time to try something.)

In other words, he gave us the kind of week to week control you'd get at work in many places. My group definitely had a few rounds of "Next week is really lousy for me at work, can I do X which I find easier for this next presentation?" and we were all fine with it, because those people pulled their weight at other times, or would go "Hey, I don't mind doing this annoying task I can fit into other things, in exchange."

My group settled into a "I like doing X, anyone else want it this week." pattern pretty comfortably, with occasional "I'd like to practice Y, can I do that this time?" once or twice for each of us.

5) My classes were in a program where most people were working at least part time, and getting together outside of class was very difficult (most of us were only on campus for our classes). He gave us enough time in class to coordinate what we were doing so we could do the rest of it online.

We'd meet for 30 minutes (or whatever) at the tail end of class with the time he gave us, divide up tasks, and meet for 30-45 minutes before class to pull it all together, with email and online file sharing in between. But that meant usually one person did the slides, etc.

This was huge - recognising the other stuff going on in our lives that meant we weren't going to go to campus to meet up, or were not going to all be free at the same time except for the actual class time we'd agreed on. This is a thing I think a lot of other group work has failed at for me. It meant people could work at their own pace and in their own best way, with a little time for coordinating provided in class. It took out a lot of the frustration of group work for me, because I wasn't waiting around for people to read things, or process through them.

[liv]

This is such an awesomely helpful and comprehensive answer, thank you. It makes a lot of sense to be explicit about the ways that education is artificial, even when you're supposed to be learning professional skills. And I really like your point 5, building in coordination into actual class time, and acknowledging that people have lives outside class and don't just all live in the same dorm with no commitments beyond study.

Consistent groups working on lots of projects for 8-12 weeks is what I'm aiming for, but that's not always going to be feasible. I think that model has loads of advantages over getting people to do a one-off large project as a group.

The thing of creating space to try things and take risks sounds like generally awesome educational practice, not just a good way of running group work. I really love your description of the sorts of approaches that facilitate that, though.

[jenett]

It was such an exception to the usual run of group work (and even other group work experiences in that same program, though I had a gap of nearly 5 years between starting my degree and doing the last 4 classes, and the really awesome class was the first one I took when I started back.)

I do think the 'lots of projects' helped a lot, and also that our core grade wasn't based on the group work, but on individual parts, which made a lot of the group stuff less fraught.

He's still teaching in the same program - if you'd like me to do an intro by email at some point, let me know. I'm pretty sure he'd be delighted.

[liv]

Thank you. I may well take you up on that, because this somewhat frivolous DW post is related to a major professional project, and part of what I need to be doing is form networks with great teachers. I'll PM you.

[hatam_soferet]

In school, I didn't like group work because nobody liked me, so I was never part of the group to begin with, and participating was a doomed endeavour. Possibly teacher input and guidance on working in groups might have helped, but that never really happened. I also didn't have the maturity to see, and nobody would acknowledge, that a school project is not life and death, so it doesn't matter if it doesn't go perfectly or the idea is idiotic.

If I have to do group projects now, like in a French class or something, I've got the skills to find out how the assessment will be done, make sure I show my part to best advantage so I get a decent grade, and not get invested in the project as a whole because it doesn't matter that much. Often it's pretty crap but I've sucked it up because I need the French and the class is free.

In work contexts, again, I've learned how to maximize what I want to get out of something and how to assert when a thing isn't working, and how to get less emotionally invested so as to accept Good Enough in place of Perfect.

These last two are me doinf self-management. I have a feeling that management of some kind is critical to people not getting left out or tormented for trying to participate. If you're trying to teach group-working skills, you have to TEACH, you can't just dump people in groups and expect it to work. If you're not trying to teach that, and you're just short-cutting assessment or something, it's not going to work for everyone plus you aren't really doing your job.

[liv]

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.

[hatam_soferet]

Not maybe downplaying assignments, but acknowledging that education is artificial--I think that's a brilliant thing to make explicit.