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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}