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  • Writer's pictureDenise Ziegler

What is wrong with individual work?



Group work seems to be the key to many problems related to teaching. Students are put in groups to make teaching in courses with a large number of students more interactive. Groupwork is supposed to foster a diversity of points of views and to generate peer learning. All this is possible but not without individual learning. How can we foster individual learning as part of group work?


In my opinion a group is an abstract concept, a group does not learn anything. But individuals of a group can and do learn if they get the chance to so.


Individuals of a group have different ways of learning. Often this is declared as a problem of group work because the workload is distributed unevenly, and in a teaching situation the grading or assessment is difficult do make. To acknowledge as a teacher or as any group member that there is no even workload distribution in group work is a first step to better functioning group work. In a football team there are different players needed, fast ones and steady ones, clever ones and persistent ones and all kinds of combinations of the former. Similarly, the role and the workload of each member in group work may be different an dit may change.


My experience in research teams and group work situations in a team of teachers is, that there are often different degrees of interests and commitments involved a in group work: one person is “pulling” the group whereas others are contributing to the extent that is possible for them at the time. Important in this situation is, that all members of the group are aware of how the group works and they agree on this way of working. Occasionally, it is essential to ask: why are we doing this in group work?


In a small research group of three researchers we found out, that individual work is an important part of our group work. Our aim is not to create one voice or one outcome with our research but do bring together different points of views to our subjects. That is why we work individually and bring the individual work into the group’s meetings. There, we give feedback to each other in a way, that may challenge and mix the authorship of the individual research. We process the group research at the same time as our individual research. This method of learning by combining individual work and group work we call a continuous and ongoing prototyping of collaboration.

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