Academia: Group Work
Thursday's Child Has to Meet in the Coffee Bar to Finish the Group Project Due on Monday
Via a friend’s Facebook feed, I came across this useful essay on group work assignments in courses from a University of North Carolina professor, Todd Zakrajsek.
I’ve taught classes with group assignments. It often feels like the right thing to do either in terms of pacing the class, in terms of the nature of the material, or in terms of the goals I have for the course. I have very rarely felt like it worked well for everybody. There’s always a team that has a good experience and produces something that they’re happy with and I’m happy with. There’s almost always a team that can barely stand each other and who resentfully produce something they know is really weak. There are groups that find a way for everybody to do something effectively individual that they can put a group title on (basically like your average scholarly anthology). There are groups where two or three people absolutely carry the other two who do almost nothing while seething all the while that the really great project is going to be rewarded even though the professor isn’t really aware of how useless the two free riders were.
So no wonder students mostly dread and hate group work assignments.
We are sometimes told by alumni, by employers, by administrators, and by faculty colleagues that we need to assign more group work because that’s what work in the real world involves, that it’s a competency or skill set that needs to be built up. I’m sympathetic to that call, up to a point.
The problem with that call is that it usually imagines “group work” in generic terms and depending on who is doing the calling sometimes in rather dishonest terms. What people who work in extremely hierarchical structures sometimes mean is that they want us to teach students how to be at the bottom of a hierarchy, how to follow orders and accept subordination—or how to be the sort of calculating, scheming, ambitious figure who climbs up the hierarchy over the mangled futures of other people. They don’t say it that way because they intuitively know that we can’t walk in front of a university classroom where everybody’s paying tuition and say, “We’re going to do some group assignments. In each group, four of you will be the underlings and one of you will be the CEO, and the CEO will automatically get an A even if the work sucks. I’ll randomly assign the roles. Good luck!” Other people making the call are genuinely asking us to teach a big group how to sort itself into working groups that have real affinities and mutual respect. Some want us to teach students how to audit their own skill sets and find collaborations where that skill is valuable to the end goal. Some want us to teach people the emotional intelligence that creates stronger socialities and mutual support regardless of the goal and regardless of the people in a given group, where the process matters far more than the outcome.
(If you want a more subtle example of just how invested a lot of people in business and other institutional settings are in representing group work as happy, normal, and positive even though they may know that it often isn’t, try looking up “collaboration” as a keyword on major stock images sites and you’ll see a huge flood of valedictory, generic images.)
I keep coming back in my own head to the “Restaurant Wars” episode of every season of Top Chef. In it, two teams of four contestants (often picked in the same way that kids pick teams for softball or soccer, etc., where two team leads choose one at a time the people they want on their team from a dwindling group of possibilities) have to open a pop-up restaurant for one night. The judges pick one team as the winner and then pick one person on that team as the individual winner. One chef on the losing team is eliminated from the competition. So there’s a group goal (win!) but also an individual goal (you can be the worst chef on the winning team and survive, so there’s the free rider problem; you can be the overall best chef on any team but if your teammates bomb out, that doesn’t matter).
Season after season, there’s a pattern to who wins and loses. Teams win if they’re extremely clear about the roles that each individual will play and they accurately match people to those roles in terms of their talents. Assign the least organized person to front of the house or as the expediter because nobody wants to deal with the pressure of either role and you’re screwed. They win if they establish a workflow that all four members understand and can respect, which usually takes being extremely clear about what it’s going to be and about honesty if someone’s not comfortable with the set-up. They win if everybody has some flexibility about adapting to a coherent concept—but also is willing to stop a strong personality from steamrolling the others into a concept the rest of them hate. They win if they’re individually talented but also if they look out for each other and work to understand the other person’s ideas for their dish or dishes. They win if they talk to one another as they go, but not if they talk too much or think too consciously about what they’re doing.
I think those are all things we hope will happen in classes when we assign students to do group work, that everyone will learn those kinds of lessons about collaboration. But as per the linked article, we don’t get that because we rarely have a goal as clear as “you win or you lose”, we rarely have an explicit or understood standard of what we’re asking for like “open a pop-up restaurant that functions smoothly and that diners (including the judges) enjoy going to”, and we almost never debrief groups afterwards to ask them what they learned about being in a group—something that Top Chef does in two ways (one by eavesdropping on the contestants as they go along and as they reflect on the outcome, the other when the judges tell them how they did while everyone listens).
I’m going to do a one-day class session in January where we’re going to revisit some work I did with the students in August about writing in college. I’m going to put up six possible prompts where what I want them to do is write the one prompt they absolutely know they wouldn’t want to write or even discuss and the one prompt they know they’d prefer on a piece of paper and then seal that in an envelope with their name on it. Then we’re going to discuss the prompts with an eye to assessing their desirability and viability as a writing assignment. The secret goal is to influence the group towards preferring your favorite and hating your least favorite. And then we’re going to vote and find out who “won” and who “lost” and why, and that will be our other conversation—how to shape outcomes in groups and collaborations without being too obvious about it.
Even in pedagogical situations where the structures of group work are very clearly established and justified—say, in laboratory-based courses, in performance or in team sports—we don’t really talk about that kind of skill. How do you navigate groups where rivalry, competition or unequal allocations of labor and reward are hard-baked into them? How do you navigate groups where solidarity, mutual support and understanding are the mandated ethos? (And especially for the latter, how do you bake that into a pedagogical exercise in a way that’s vivid, real and consistent rather than a kind of abstract wish or disclaimer that has no real influence on the work the group undertakes?) If you’re a coach, you’re generally going to be pretty clear about why you want specific individuals to take on specific roles—and you’re going to get requests from students who want to play a different position or play more. Most coaches, performance faculty, or laboratory-based faculty are going to step around being completely transparent with all students at all times about the decisions being made in role assignments, but more importantly, they’re very rarely going to sit down with each individual and say, “Here’s how you navigate the decision rules that I have and the constraints of this activity in order to better realize your own aspirations even if I don’t want you to”.
In my next round of teaching, if I do group work, that’s the kind of thing I want to do. I want to create specific structures, I want tangible reasons why there’s a group project, I want to limit and focus how the groups work, I want to be explicit about the different kinds of group processes I’m trying to teach about and why I’m thinking of them as valuable skills.
There is another problem hanging around in there, which is that it might be hard for many of us to teach explicitly about groups because many of our own experiences of group or collective work in our actually working environments are so bad and many of us feel less-than-skilled at operating in groups. That can be a strength, though. In the same way that you can teach writing by showing how you write, edit, revise, and dissecting the writing of others? You can talk about groups you’ve been in, and about actually existing cases of collaboration, good and bad. Skills and methods require not just practice but specificity before, during and after we use them for us to not only acquire but understand them—and to make mature decisions about how we want to use them and when we object to the ways in which they are required of us by others.
Image credit: Photo by Rafael Idrovo Espinoza on Unsplash
I use group work as a gambit to get the students to know one another, so we can cohere better as a larger group. Inevitably there are jerks and there are perfectionists; mostly there are ordinary students who want the project to go well. I do my best for those. I randomize the groups to a certain extent, but once I get the lay of the land, I start putting certain people together to spread the talent more widely. What I don’t allow is the super group or the loser group. And I mostly do group work in-class now so that resentments are not allowed to fester.
Really interesting challenge. There is a history of team-work and team building. And I guess the military has been trying for this amidst hierarchy. I also think of those who have trouble finishing anything, a quality that may be made even more difficult in the group exercise as the group finishes the work anyway. And I know two people over the decades who made their living as basically contractors finishing the work that teams and groups never seem to have been able to finish. Top Chef is a great lab for this. Thanks Tim.