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

[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.