Cautionary Words About Group Work

 

The purpose of these cautionary words isn't to scare you away from group projects; they are to free you from the misguided notion that things will go perfectly. 

Group projects are messy:

No matter what you do. Even with perfect planning things will go wrong. Even with perfect students things will go wrong.

Logistics:

An awful lot of student energy is spent on logistics that often have nothing or very little to do with the learning goals of the project. If you leave things up to the group to decide you aren't always giving students freedom and autonomy. Instead, you're ensuring that the first problem the group has to solve has nothing to do with the project's goals. Sometimes, telling students how you'd like them to communicate or collaborate gets the ball rolling faster.

Measures of Success:

Let's say students have submitted their final group projects and the submissions aren't half-bad. You're not done! Students are whole people, and in order to care for the whole person we have to take into account the quality of the experience, not just the deliverable. Survey your students about their experience working on the group project. Have them evaluate their experience working with each other as well. Invite and reward their complete honesty because students can give you really valuable feedback that you can use to improve the experience for future groups.

If at first you don't succeed...

Just because a project didn't work out one quarter doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea. Maybe you did everything right and the project still didn't go as well as you'd hoped. The trouble with students is that they are people. Students in a class are multifarious and unpredictable. As much as we'd like to generalize or make assumptions for the sake of convenience, we can't. This is something we relearn every time we teach. Revise the project and try again next quarter.