What is wrong with individual work?
- Denise Ziegler
- Apr 30, 2022
- 2 min read
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.
You are completely right. Group work can easily make some student be less interactive, slackers. In our courses for the first year students, we usually have some sort of group contract that allows the group to kick (after talking to a teacher) members if they do not do their work. We assign them in random groups so they are less likely to work with their friends. In our programming courses we usually only allow 3 people in a group, but even then it is too many. In programming, I would suggest two people only (pair programming). When the students are in groups of 3 there is usually one student that does least amount of work. I would love to have…
Thank you Denise for bringing up this point of view! I also liked the analogy of a football team and the strenghts that each player/ group member brings to a team. It is also important to act from the goal and think about what kind of working suits best for achieving that goal: individual work, group work, peer feedback, etc.
I like the analogy of the sports team! A great way to think about group work. I feel the same way when thinking about my own PBL group. We all have different personalities, but work together really well. I also see group work a s a chance for students to reflect on their own way of thinking an learning and use it to reach the best possible outcome.