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

[ewt]

My memories of group work in school:
-I didn't have great social skills so was often "last pick" when we chose our own groups
-I was perceived as smart and often ended up doing the bulk of the work, especially for projects I found easy
-I was never taught how to negotiate division of labour
-mission creep
-Other students sometimes mostly wanted to goof off instead of learning
-there would be several small groups in the same classroom, which meant a lot of noise, which made everything else harder to navigate
-sometimes in group presentations people would add their own opinions whilst presenting, this weakening the argument we were trying to make
-sometimes it was assumed we would get in touch with our group to work on things together outside of class time. For kids with no independent means of transport this wasn't always possible, and my extra-curricular schedule made it difficult too.
-in some groups the other kids conspired to trick or tease me, and when I got upset about this I was penalised for "not getting along with the group".

In general, the smaller the group the more pleasant I found group work; working with one other person was usually OK as long as the noise wasn't too bad. Working with two other people could kindof work in the right context, but wasn't exactly fun. More than that got really unpleasant.

That said:
I really enjoy chamber music, and I suspect that group work with appropriate boundaries and good division of labour can be positive and enjoyable in a similar way.

[liv]

Thanks very much for reporting your experience, these are really helpful examples. Surprisingly enough I know lots of people who are (or were, at least) academically smart but socially not brilliant, and those are people who especially suffer from badly run group-work.

It's a really good point about the noise. That's a major accessibility issue and one of the things I feel I really need a clear plan for handling. Because even if it's possible to send people off into separate rooms, you lose the ability of the teacher to wander round providing advice and generally keeping an eye on things. And yes to dealing with the issue of extra-curricular scheduling.

Definitely need to explicitly teach things like negotiating, dividing a task, giving a presentation of pre-prepared material. Simply expecting students, especially kids but at any age, to magically have those quite advanced skills is a recipe for disaster.

I think the social dynamics need to be actively managed, with meaningful recourse if someone is being bullied. That's certainly easier said than done, but there are lots of things (thank you for the chamber music example) that groups can do but individuals can't, and I want access to those.

[ewt]

I would go so far as to say that if I had been explicitly taught the skills involved in doing group work, the group work itself would have been a good opportunity to practice those skills, particularly some of the social ones, in a semi-structured way that had benefits outside of the group work.