Groupwork doesn’t

Today I received permission to do a group assignment solo. The teacher didn’t seem happy about it, but I’m convinced that for me it was the right thing to do.

It’s not that I can’t or don’t work with others, two minds are almost always better than one and it’s a nice way to break up the solitude of coding. But in a school environment I’ve learned that few group projects are worth doing in groups – particularly when it’s limited to a short-term partnership for a relatively atomic project.

Like it or not, the current Canadian school system is structured to be a selfish endeavor. Everyone gets individual grades, individual certificates and individual scholarships. It may be a cynical way to look at it, but the current education system is all about self-improvement. Everyone is after their own carrot.

In most team-oriented work environments, the selfish part of work – the pay – is not directly linked to meeting the bottom-line requirements, but rather overall performance in achieving those requirements. As a result, the client, the company and even pride in one’s work has the opportunity to become central to the motivation, which makes the work itself the focal point, not the individual payoff.

The most successful groupwork I’ve seen is in long-term projects that allow students to be creative and invest themselves in the work instead of the grade. Students can exercise creativity and take ownership of their work. At that point, teams can be extremely beneficial – especially when combined with an evaluation scheme that allows students to receive both individual and group assessments to address both individual and collective success: measuring overall performance and not just their ability to meet specifications.

Of course there will always be the lazy one and the one that takes on more than his/her fair share, but that is far more representative of a real group environment than a short-term collective in which no student has any real attachment to the group other than what they can individually get out of it.

It seems to me that school-simulated group experiences are only useful if the benefits and motivations of a productive group experience are present. You can’t reproduce one part and not the other.

Telling students to work together on a one-off assignment almost inevitably results in students splitting up the work, never speaking with one another, and then stitching it together at the last minute – each student only learning what they must to get through their part. And often this sort of division is necessary because the structure of the course or project isn’t designed for teams.

Working with groups is a critical skill for any person in any workforce, but it’s hard to teach effectively when it has an individual price.