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

[fred_mouse]

I have been on the 'community partner' side of the equation of that sort of group work, and have had very variable results. But what I did see, and what you describe here, is how useful the process can be if there are very clear steps along the way, and if the community partner accepts that they might be putting in quite a bit of time for no gain to them.

Outcomes for the community group of the three projects I was on: One took on one of the original students to expand and deal with the 'desirable extras' that hadn't been in the core project, and then took on a different student when the first one got a job, and ~5 years later has been rebuilt for a new operating system and is still being used for the original purpose, streamlining data collection in a research project. One produced a workable product, but there were server issues and set up issues, and eventually it was abandoned. The last produced a barely useable product, but it proved to the organisation that what I wanted was both feasible and useful, and a completely different product was built in house.

Outcomes for the students: Every single one of those students started out a bit awkward and unsure of what was going on. Even the outgoing ones. By the end, they were all confident about talking to us at a professional level (even the group that couldn't get it together to produce paperwork on time). They had learned to talk about their speciality to people who didn't necessarily talk it. And they had worked through one methodology for how to develop a project and when and where to get client by in. (And lots of 'small' details as well -- such as that Open Office eats MS Word comments; that where you have your meetings matters; that clients may well have read the document in proposal document in detail and remember everything you promised, so make sure those are feasible. Anything you can't promise should be in stretch goals).