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

[alasse_irena]

Okay, this is going to be long.

In my experience what we all hated about group work wasn't actually the assignments themselves, or the need to work with other people, it was just the fact that your mark at the end was partly dependent on someone else, and in contexts where marks are Really Important, the idea of someone else having a hand in how well you do is Very Stressful.

And it's not even that you don't trust your classmates not to let you down. It's just that different students have different priorities. Like one person wants to do really well in this subject, they need to impress this professor because if they do an honours thesis they want her as their supervisor, or whatever; and another one is just trying to struggle through this subject because it's compulsory, and it's not important that they excel, just that they pass and never have to see it again, and they'd rather spend their energy on some other area that they're more invested in. So it's not even as though the person who's not putting as much effort into the group project as you are is being lazy, or shitty: they've just got other things that are more important to them and this isn't really their passion.

Another thing that makes groupwork stressful is just different people having different work processes. Some people prefer to stew over their project internally for a while, and then do all the work in one go once they've finished thinking, and others like to work on things little by little, gradually. So you end up with group situations where people feel like they're being made to start working before they've got any idea what they want to be doing, or people feel like they'd like to get started as soon as possible, please, and their team isn't ready yet.

Sometimes to try and ensure that everyone pulls their weight on the project, there's a peer evaluation component to the final mark, so you're also marked on how your group members rate the experience of working with you. But student solidarity is a strong force so I can think of no time where a group I was in didn't just sit down together and go, "So we'll all just give each other five out of five for every category?" "Nah, put down a four for communication skills or something, so it looks convincing."

I mostly had pretty good experiences of groupwork, in that we quickly established systems that meant that groupwork wasn't really groupwork at all. Like we'd meet as a group when we got the assignment, divvy up the tasks among the members so that everyone was assigned an equal share, then everyone would work on their bit independently and we'd meet at the end to combine it all. Which made it seem a bit pointless, given that other than a quick meeting to delegate tasks, we never actually did any group work at all.

That issue can probably be resolved by reconsidering the *kinds* of tasks that are given as groupwork, so that the most efficient way to do it is actually to work in a group. As for the issue of having to rely on other people to ensure your mark is good - I don't know how you can take the stress out of that without entirely restructuring the education system.