The joy of group work

Today's Chronicle of Higher Education online edition has a short article about student reactions to group work. It begins ...

Speaking before a crowd of more than 500 people here on Saturday afternoon, three undergraduates made a plea to the world’s college instructors: no more group assignments—at least not until you figure out how to fairly grade each student’s individual contributions. [http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/06/19509n.htm]

Since I assign a lot of group work in my courses, I think a lot about group work. I also have some stories I tell my students.

But these students' concern is one that I hear a lot, and I think it reveals something important that we need to teach our students: Once you leave college (or high school, or whatever educational level you're at), you will regularly end up working in groups. And, whether you like it or not, you are often judged less on your contributions to the group than to the group's overall success. So, even if you're stuck with people who don't pull their weight (or, as problematically, people who think they need to do everything in the project, and won't let anyone else contribute), you still need to find a way to make your project succeed. College should therefore be a time you use to develop the skills to deal with these and other issues of group work.

I also tell my students that even though I am in a relatively individualistic profession, I still end up working on a lot of group projects. It's an important lesson for them to learn. Of course, I also admit to them that my wife hated group work and tell them a few stories about my own educational experiences with group work.

In junior high, I was in a class (some social studies class, if I remember correctly) in which the instructor gave us a choice of working together as a class or by ourselves. I was the only person who chose to work by himself. And it was clearly the right decision, since I scored better than the class.

Of course, that's not the form of group work we talk about these days, so I also give an example that is closer to home.

Toward the end of my undergraduate career (1985 or so), I took a course in artificial intelligence. That course had a large project component. (Our project had many issues, I may write about them another time.) At the end of the project, it seemed that one person had done about 90% of the work, another had done about 10% of the work, and the third had made the cover page for our report.

No, I wasn't the one who did the cover page. I also wasn't the one who did 90% of the work. Do I think I should have done more? Yes, but the person who did 90% of the work didn't seem to mind (or at least my memory is cloudy enough that I don't think he minded). I helped on the important parts and made good contributions to the project. And I learned an important lesson that's carried my through professional projects: If you're working with the right people and you trust each other, things balance out.

These days, I end up on lots of committees with lots of projects. On some projects, I do more than what is officially my share. On others, I don't always have the time (or inclination) to do everything I should. I don't get extra credit when I do extra work and I don't get penalized when I do less than I should. The important thing is that these committees are successful at accomplishing a wide variety of tasks. It seems to work itself out naturally that people pick up the slack when they can. Maybe I'm just lucky to work with good people. Maybe we all learned some group work skills over the years. Whatever the reason, it's clear to me that these groups do succeed, and they succeed, in part, because we all care about the success of the group rather than our "individual grade".