I have always loathed group projects, mostly due to personal experience in middle and high school. I was always the kid who knew what was going on and perennially pissed at those who didn’t or didn’t care. Pedagogically, i was always told that you needed to learn such a skill because it’s how the world works. I rolled my eyes at pedagogy (or, more accurately, at that age i gave it my finger). In college, i learned to appreciate group projects a bit more. My department was set up so that in the fourth semester, you had to choose a team for a huge final project. For the most part, we all knew each other by that point and there was a social cohesion that made such group work very manageable. Of course, there was always that one group made up of folks who didn’t know each other and inevitably got the lowest score.
I’ve always wondered about the pedagogical strengths and weaknesses of group project work in courses. How do you get past the rotten apple problem? How do you make group projects not have so much overhead that they take up a bazillion hours of negotiation? How do you help people contain their frustration? In other words, as a teacher, what do i gain/lose from group projects? And how do i overcome my own fears of them?
I’ve been hearing that school systems around here in CA, now, are getting very good at designing intelligent group projects and that the kids actually get trained in how to collaborate.
I think there is a little bit of a kibbutznik effect when this happens; not a bad thing, but noticeable…
You don’t. Group work is supposed to be a slice of real life. Soemthing that the pedagogy can only catch a glimpse of (but, never really realize since “school”–by definition–is not the “real world”). As you are aware, in the “real world” you don’t often get a choice of the groups you end up working with. I would argue that the groups where people were familiar with one another probably got the better grade, but the groups of strangers probably got the better lesson. And that’s what learning is all about.
Have you read Vygotsky and his Zone of Proximal Development theory [1]? (Krashen developed similar stuff independently in his second language acquisition theories). The basic idea is that students will only really *acquire* something when they are pressed to do something that they are incapable of on their own, but capable of doing with help (that help can come from teacher guidance or peer collaboration). It’s a neat idea.
But, yes, the bad apple problem is the weakness in these group projects. Bah on freeloaders and uncohesive groups. I never liked group group projects for just that reason, regardless of what pedaogy theory says about how useful they are.
[1] for your copious spare time, here is a good overview of Vygotskyan ZPD.
I’m trying something different this semester. I started with team leaders. Got volunteers by saying there’d be some extra credit for being a team leader. The team leaders then chose which project their team would work on. Then I went through asking who wanted to be on whose team working on which project. That basically formed the groups (there were a few holdouts, but I coerced them onto one of the undermanned teams by the next meeting). Then I delegated team management to the team leaders. I’ve made it clear that I will vary credit for the team project if the team leader says I should. One team leader has already asked me to read the riot act on an uncooperative team member, so I think it’s working.
But I’ll know better by the end of the semester.
I can undertsand the fear and distaste for group projects. I used to have a similar attitude towards them. Lately however, I’d been thinking that group projects teach us as much about humility and understanding as about work or working with others. I’d been thinking – how are group projects different from collaborations? As academics, we collaborate a lot and for many of us this is one of the more important aspects of doing what we do. Collaborations are, essentially, group projects, where everyone involved potentially cares just a little more and the bad apple problem happens just a little less often. Yet these problems still happen, differences in priorities also happen. Some collaborations become a “never again” “one off” deal, others continue for a lifetime. Group projects may not be such a bad thing pedagogically. If you learn to salvage the bad apple no matter what and to gage potential group members better, it may be a great deal of help later on… At least that’s what I keep telling myself now 🙂
I’m a doctoral student and one of the most useful projects during my course work was a collaboration. Working (from CA) with people in Minnesota, New Jersey, and Saudi Arabia during a single (semester long) project was very worthwhile experience.
The prof dealt with group problems by requiring that each of us rate the contributions of the other team members. That alone could change potential grades.
hey danah,
i am a secondary school teacher and i often use cooperative learning techniques in my classroom, such as group work.
as a kid, and throughout my university education i often loathed group work for many of the reasons you cited. and then i met a teacher whose kids, working in learning support teams, were producing stuff in ways that none of them could possibly have done individually.
i spent a number of days in her classroom and was truly inspired by what the students were experiencing, their general ability to confront potential conflict before it materialised into issues and arguments, and their collective enthusiasm about learning. and these weren’t hand-picked kids or any such nonsense…
the class teacher had focused most of the last twenty years of her career on developing and implementing group-work strategies. she was truly a master. we have had many extended conversations about cooperative learning and the most valuable piece of advice i could pass along are: know why you are assigning the project in groups and design something such that it could not be accomplished without the input of many minds. approach the beginning with a very clear sense of the end in mind. move the assessment tool off the group project, or make the project a multi-fasceted one.
a book that i have found helpful in this regard is called _understanding by design_ by grant wiggins and jay mctighe.
feel free to drop an email if you want to have a more detailed conversation.
good luck!
nan
My hypothesis has been that you could design a class so that it has multiple group projects with varying team members (that change for every group).
Given some model for group performance as a non-linear function of individual skill and effort, I’d assume you could decently estimate any one person’s ability given a small number of different group projects with permuted teammates.
Needless to say, I’ve never tried this as a student or a teacher 🙂
I taught a computer animation class for two years in which every assignment was collaborative. Based on students’ reviews of the experience, and the quality of the finished projects, I’d say it was a success for all concerned.
Nan is right on when she says “design something such that it could not be accomplished without the input of many minds”. I think that was what made the class work so well when it did work. There were a few assignments where that didn’t quite happen, and those were less successful.
Awu, the permuted groups method was exactly what we did in this class. We had fifteen students which we divided into five groups of three for each assignment, and we shuffled them around to make sure every student worked with every other student at least once over the course of the quarter.
For me the most difficult aspect was grading. But one thing that made it easier was that I told the students in advance that a portion of their grade would be based on how well they collaborated with others. Because of the permuted groups, the bad apples were easy to spot, and in the end they dragged their own grades down much more than their groupmates’.
I have a good amount of experience with instructors who’ve implemented group projects. The most successful have been those who, as Cheryl commented, required group members to grade each others’ performance. Given the competitive nature of Cornell, students try to be reasonable with evaluating each other, but they refuse to allow someone’s slacking to interfere with their own grades.
How else can you make group projects work? Work to each student’s strength. Dave Schwartz does this by offering an interdisciplinary game design course. It’s offered as a programming course, an art course, and a music course (scoring the moving image) and teams are formes with members that work to each strength. It quickly becomes obvious if any students are slacking off, as their contributions are sufficiently distinct. Dave and I also did a lot of work designing a space that would encourage students to do collaborate work with computers, and we’re currently pulling together our research plan for the space.
One more way to deal with this was addressed by Hod Lipson; he’s an engineering professor who implemented an electronic workflow system. It wasn’t much more than an implementation of CVS that was customized for his class’ purposes, but it tracked all accesses to files and let TAs see who did how much work.
Great postings, everyone! I teach at the college level and use group work immediately to create intimacy in public speaking. I have students do two activities in silence (sorting by height and then age.) Then they are partnered oldest to youngest. This has actually worked very well and most everyone in the class has had a great experience. They do an interview and introduce their partner to the class. I watch as they are conducting the interview and pair up 2 couples as partners for the entire semester. They immediately move into the group for a group project and presentation of review questions from the book. This has helped tremendously in preparation for their first ‘stand alone’ speech. I do not use podiums or lecturns. I am now teaching a group dynamics class and will do a similar sorting for partner intro and then one group project. I also plan to change groups by initially giving each student a number 1-4 or 1-5 and arranging by numbers….it will depend on the size of the class, of course. In real life, we don’t every get to control who we work with and who tells us what to do. I also plan to bring in speakers who discuss their real-life stories about working in teams and groups. Great information, everyone!!! Thanks so much!