Groupwork – Kathryn Woodcock, PhD CCPE ICAE PEng

Groupwork: the paradox of learning through aggravation

Long after marks have been forgotten, the lessons of some assignments will be remembered. When we get the expected satisfactory results, we often think no more of it: the outcome was as expected. If the good mark means we think no more of the assignment, then we may also never think again of the material we learned to be able to complete the assignment. Sometimes the very reason we do well is that the assignment required us to demonstrate something we already knew or a skill we already had, in effect, not learn anything at all. Of course, this is not the purpose of an assignment.

Groupwork – beyond acrimony

Enduring lessons also often come from group work. Twenty or thirty years from now, you will remember the group project where you had to pick up the slack for a teammate, and the self-respect you developed from pulling through for the team. In professional careers, everyone has to work with others. Even the metaphorical forest ranger alone in his tree house needs to have the support of others. Teamwork requires more than division of labour: that just produces work that equals the sum of the parts. Effective teamwork leads to team output that is more than the sum of the parts. It must not lead to output that is less than the sum of the parts!

Buying in to the good of the group

(power is over-rated)

For groups to work well, the members must buy in to the importance of succeeding as a team rather than the importance of protecting their individual reputations (or in the case of an assignment, their individual marks). Protecting the individual means keeping a second set of books to be able to cut the ties with other members if the going gets tough. Groups that are not wholeheartedly committed to success as a group often end up resorting to backstabbing, seeking to be evaluated individually, or seeking to have teammates penalized.

Functional groups look for complementary roles

Functional groups find ways to go around, over, or through the weaknesses of members. If you have a teammate who cannot proofread her way out of a paper bag, you proofread her work. If you have a person who collects factual information like nobody’s business, but cannot see the big picture, you break the project down and give him a self-contained piece to do, then help him knit that material into the report as a whole. If someone has poor English writing skills, you can encourage him or her to get assistance from the Writing Centre, but also have the group team up to edit his or her section. Over the years, I have received many papers that contain really great ideas, but the English is terrible. I have to penalize the English, but the group doesn’t. The group can and should edit not just to repair the contributions from individuals, but also to make the “voice” of the paper consistent. In doing this, functional groups are sensitive to the members’ contributions, and involve all members in the final edition. This way, each person sees how their own material was made better by the group process. The functional group turns in work that is more than the sum of the parts.

Functional groups are not just lucky

It is tempting for dysfunctional group members to think that they would have had an effective group “if only” they had not been stuck with person A, B, or C. Groups are formed different ways, but I often assign groups using a combined randomization / balance process that attempts to ensure that the academic strengths and weaknesses of the various groups are somewhat evenly balanced. Functional groups, therefore, are not just the groups that get all the “smart” students. Functional groups work on the group relationship, and it pays off.

Functional groups put in the time

It goes without saying that the group can start working as soon as the assignment is given. (As my assignments are described in the course outline, there is no excuse for last minute drama.) Functional groups start thinking and collecting information immediately and give themselves time to do good work before the time crunch with midterms and assignments in other courses. Even those who prefer to work at the last minute can do great work in a functional team simply by scheduling the “last minute” to have a definition other than the “due date”.

Dysfunctional groups divide and conquer

and end up being less than the sum of the parts

In a dysfunctional group, the group mark is often lower than the average individual marks. The members actually make each other worse. Dysfunctional groups take their direction from the person who shouts the loudest rather than the person with the clearest understanding of the mandate, best judgement, or most persuasive logic. This results from two complementary weaknesses in the group. One is that the people who are shouting the loudest have missed the point. This could be that they have been indoctrinated in lower levels of the school system to treat assignments as a formula rather than a minimum requirement, or they want to do the assignment with the least amount of work. If they get enough teammates on board with their proposed approach, they can often shout down the wiser suggestions.

Taking leadership from the wrong direction

(the loud-shouters, not the smart-thinkers)

A good clue that you are on the express train to Dysfunction Junction is if the emerging group leadership are asking questions based on the concept “do we have to”? As a general rule, in both individual and group assignments, even if you do not “have to”, if you can think of that thing as a possibly relevant thing to do, you almost always should do it, because that could be the thing that makes the difference between a C and a B (if in fact you do have to do it) or between a B and an A (if you don’t have to do it, and you do it, then it gives a good impression of your initiative). It may be true that the majority of the group are not interested in the element being proposed by some of the members. Why not agree that members explore the various angles and elements and bring them back to pool the knowledge? Try to find ways to incorporate multiple perspectives within some kind of a unifying framework. Discouraging group members from adding new layers to the project is a red flag of dysfunction.

Being smart is not enough

(you also fail when you give up on the team)

The complementary factor that leads to dysfunction is that the people with the wiser suggestions give up trying to persuade the others or cannot put their ideas across persuasively. The A+++ student doing a group project on a topic that is years beneath them is not going to learn anything new within the content material in the topic, but that does not mean there is nothing to be learned.