I get it – most students don’t like group work. I didn’t really like group work when I was a student either. After all, work is often not divided evenly. Everyone in the group may not have the same goals for the project or class. It can be hard to know who brings what skills to the table. Etc. That said, group work helps students build critical collaboration skills, and it can often allow for more complex and interesting projects and assignments than would be manageable for a single student (or manageable for faculty to supervise for myriad individual students).
Given all this, you make think twice about having students work in pairs of small groups for graded assignments (as opposed to an in-class activity), but you still likely implement them in at least some of your classes. I know this is true for me.
You may already have a skill-development focus in your class (you can find Kate talking more about this in an earlier post). I know I talk a lot about why I have students collaborate. I also talk about strategies students/groups can use to lead to more successful collaborations, and this is where group-work contracts come into play.
There’s no one way to write them, and I use different versions with different classes/assignments/group sizes, but they all share some common elements, and the group needs to work together to complete it and submit a final, agreed-upon version as a group.
They are asked to come up with plans for how they will communicate with each other (and this often prompts the sharing of phone numbers and email addresses and/or setting up of group chats). They are also prompted to think about how often they will communicate with each other, whether all group members are part of all communications, and what a reasonable timeframe is to expect a response.
The groups also benefit from developing a plan for when their group will meet, how often, and in what format (in-person or virtually). I prompt them to talk about whether everyone needs to be at all meetings and how they will handle it if someone has to miss/misses a planned meeting.
Groups also need to develop a plan for how they’ll work with deadlines. For example, when is draft work due to the rest of the group relative to the deadline for the turn-in component of that aspect of the project? Some people feel 2am before a 9am deadline is fine, but others want time to workshop drafts amongst the group, so this really needs discussed and agreed up within the group.
Finally, I always have the group come up with a plan for how they will handle conflict such as disagreements, someone slacking off, or someone not adhering to the processes they agreed on in their collaboration contract.
I wish I could tell you this heads off all problems in groups, but it definitely doesn’t. That said, I have had groups that will reach out to a member when things drift from the agreed-upon plan and are able to get things back on track on their own. More often, however, it gives me a better foundation for moderating group conflict as the problem is almost always related to something they had been asked to develop a plan for.
Once I implemented these contracts as a required first group assignment, conflict did decrease within groups, and me intervening when conflict did arise definitely became easier. Consider giving it a try as you finalize your plans for your fall semester classes.
What else have you find helps smooth the way for successful group work?