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Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Shouldn't We Move Past This As A Society?

Nope, not a political rant today.  At least I don't think it's tied up on politics in any way...

What I'm going to complain about is group assignments in educational settings.  It has been the bane of my existence since I was in 4th grade.  I still remember the assistant principal of my elementary school coming into my class and explaining the concept of "cooperative learning."  Back then, it was more structured.  Each group was supposed to divide into rolls:  leader, recorder, reporter, and maybe some other stuff I've forgotten.  I think even as a kid, I was hoping and expecting it to be a passing fad, but the concept has had a distressing amount of staying power.

In my experience, there has been a lot less group work in higher ed.  But in my K-12 years, I heard various excuses for group work.  One thing I heard a lot was that it was a way for students who were doing better to help students who were lagging behind, which always made me wonder how that was fair to the students who were doing well.  Another excuse was that eventually, we would all be in jobs that required massive amounts of group work, and we needed to get used to working together.

Well.  I can't speak for everyone's jobs, of course, but I can speak to the ones I've had.  Some of my jobs, like teaching, have actually required little to no group work.  Other jobs I've had involved completing tasks or projects in teams, but really in those situations, we were usually working individually on portions of projects that would all be put together in the end.  So we weren't putting up with each others neuroses and idiosyncrasies on a daily basis.  Also, it's worth pointing out that everyone was getting paid for their teamwork efforts. Personally, I will put up with a lot more when money is involved.

What inspired this particular rant is that I had a considerable amount of group work in one of my classes this semester, which, I'm happy to report, ended yesterday with the presentation of the last project.  Even under the best circumstances, this amount of group work would have been challenging, but the person I worked with turned out to be a complete nightmare.  She consistently waited until right before projects were due to do any work, and then second-guessed (and sometimes deleted) work I'd already done.  Then she would waste time agonizing over what other students in the class were doing and messing around with formatting.  She would then be miffed that I didn't want to match her amount of time engaged in useless behaviors that masquerade as "working."  In principle, it's supposed to be faster to complete projects with another person, but I'm convinced I would have finished all of the projects much faster on my own.

I understand that some people work better in groups as individuals.  But those of us who work better individually shouldn't be forced into that model, and people should stop talking about how beneficial group work is for us in the long run.  The fastest way for this nonsense to go away is for educators to stop forcing group work on everyone.  Can we finally take that step as a society?

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