Right Wing Nation

I was prompted to write this by a comment Rory made on another post. He said:

Jetgirl, I truly sympathize with you in the group learning setting. In the military we have to attend leadership courses that require group speeches. I always ended up writing the whole speech and coaching the other members of my team, ditto for math courses. Teach kids teamwork in sports… not in education.

Ah yes. Like every other over-achieving student with whom I have discussed the topic, I despised group work as a student, because every time, the same thing happened: I ended up doing the work because the others were less motivated, less interested, or just plain dumb, and it burned my ass that they got credit for what I had done.

This is nearly inevitable if groups are randomly assigned. Groups are not going to be homogenous. Depending upon how the top students in the group perform (I’ve seen top students throw up their hands in frustration and do mediocre work), a traditional group project is either going to lower the grade of the top students, or raise the grade of the other students.

Of course, this may appeal to the Marxist sensibilities of the PC crowd, who want egalitarianism at the expense of everything else. But there’s nothing fair about it. And the group project grade does not accurately reflect the abilities or performance of the group members, so it is yet one more class grade that is a meaningless assessment.

However, there are very good arguments for assigning collaborative work. One argument for collaborative projects is that you can assign much more complex tasks than you can with individual projects, and challenge students more. But there is another argument for assigning collaborative work. If part of our mission is to prepare students for work after the university, collaboration is a must, since most will be working in groups when they get jobs. Students need to learn how to work with others, which means they need to learn to accurately assess skills, assign tasks based on strengths and weaknesses, work toward a goal with maximum efficiency and quality, develop leadership and management skills, and negotiate when the group dynamics break down. Yet traditional group work does none of these things, because nobody is held responsible, and the group is not forced to assign tasks or negotiate. Traditional group work is nothing more than a disorganized mess that results in an inaccurate assessment of the students, and at least one frustrated, if not angry, student per group.

We had no choice in our courses. We had to assign group projects. We struggled with the issues mentioned above, and we came up with a way to randomly assign groups, and deal with all the issues mentioned.

Assign groups for the entire semester

All of the social advantages of group work (negotiation skills, abilities assessment, leadership, assigning responsibility) take time to develop, more time than is allowed by assigning different groups for different projects. Assign groups as close to the beginning of the semester as possible, groups which will remain together throughout the semester. As I will cover below, this also allows for additional advantages.

Encourage group identity

We set up each group as a consulting firm, where each firm competed against the others to win the case competition. Students came up with a name for their consulting firm, created logos and stationery, and business cards (this, for all you “creativity” educrats, is what is known as productive creativity, creativity that actually has a purpose — as opposed to pointless and idiotic creativity, such as macaroni art projects or crayon and poster board projects). As a result, students enjoyed their groups more and took their groups more seriously than they otherwise would have (according to the students).

Giving groups a business identity also resulted over time in an internal organization, and encouraged students to assess their group members’ skills, strengths, and weaknesses, and assign tasks accordingly (with external help — read on). Students saw their group not as yet one more class group, but as a business, and (again, according to student reports) were more competitive with the other groups in the class. Note that this would have been minimally effective, had we changed groups for each project.

Provide structure

Don’t assume groups will organically evolve internal structure. Provide them with further motivation to do so. Assign each group to assess each member’s strengths and weaknesses, and assign tasks accordingly. Have each group come up with a list of job titles (after they have assessed strengths and weaknesses), and assign a job title to each member. We found we had to allow a certain amount of fluidity, as strengths and weaknesses changed as students learned additional, different skills, but there was less change within groups than we initially thought there would be.

We also required that groups meet at least once a week outside class, and submit a report for each meeting, that included what was discussed, what was accomplished, and who did what, as well as set the time, date and place for the next meeting. There was no way groups could only meet in class and do the complex work required for the group projects.

Force responsibility

Yes, I said force. Groups must be forced to accept responsibility for the overall quality of their work (instead of whining that so-and-so didn’t do his job), and students within groups must be forced to accept responsibility for the quality of their individual work.

We forced group responsibility by having each group sign a group contract. Each group in the contract acknowledged that it was the responsibility of the group to properly assign duties based on strengths and weaknesses, to aid members to acquire or improve skills in which they may be weak (remember that old educational adage about how the best way to learn something is to teach it to others?), to require the work be submitted to the group at least a week ahead of the due date for the group project so the group could tweak individual work if need be, and had each group set up a list of rules as well as penalties for breaking those rules. Once contracts were signed and submitted, it was each group’s responsibility to see that those contracts were enforced — meaning that if the contract specified that not attending a meeting would get the member docked 5%, that point reduction was binding for the purpose of the class. Note that this would have been meaningless, had we changed groups for each project.

We forced individual responsibility within each group by providing another contract for each project. These contracts comprised a short summary of the responsibilities assigned, and crucially, a percentage awarded to each individual in the group that reflected the amount and quality of the work done. Each person in the group had to sign the contract, next to the percentage awarded him; once signed, there was no appealing the percentage awarded.

So if, say, a group submitted a project and the project grade was 93 out of a possible 100 points, each member of the group would get the percentage awarded him of that total score. So if the contract specified that Suzie got 100%, she would get 93 points. If the contract specified that Jimmy got 90%, he got 90% of 93 points, or 83.7 points. No points were assigned to the members of any group until the group’s project contract was signed and submitted.

We quickly found that we had to set upper and lower limits on the percentages. The lower limit was 50%, though a student who came to no meetings and did no work could be assigned a zero. Because a slacker meant that others had to pick up part of his duties, we had to allow a percentage above 100%, and we set the upper limit at 105%.

Most groups assigned everyone 100% on the first project. About half the groups assigned everyone 100% on following projects. This shows that while individual responsibility slid in the beginning, groups forced members to take responsibility for their own work on succeeding projects. This would not have happened had we changed groups for each project.

Granted, this was not a perfect system. There were a handful of groups that could not agree on percentage assignations. We had a few cases where one member of the group was intensely disliked by the others (sometimes for very good reason, like Miss Goth Witch), and was screwed by the group. And we had a small number of cases where a group contained one or more control freaks that insisted on redoing every other member’s work, then taking credit for it. In these cases, we stepped in and acted as judges.

We also had no way of knowing how accurately the percentages reflected the amount and quality of work done — but the same is true in the real world. As each student had signed his name next to his percentage, however, he had taken responsibility for that amount and quality of work, and unless there was some group dynamic problem (see the last paragraph, though there were very few), we treated the percentage as an accurate assessment.

Summary

Overall, the system worked extremely well. By assigning permanent groups which formed business identities, forcing each group to assess each member’s strenghts and weaknesses and asssign job duties accordingly, as well as forcing each group to come up with a list of job titles and assign them to members, and providing students with the needed structure and forcing them to take responsibility for their work, we ended up with highly productive groups and avoided the pitfalls of traditional group work.