What is true for individual assignments holds true for group assignments: it is important to clearly articulate your objectives, explicitly define the task, clarify your expectations, model high-quality work, and communicate performance criteria.
But group work has complexities above and beyond individual work. To ensure a positive outcome, try some of these effective practices (adapted from Johnson, Johnson & Smith, 1991) or come talk to us at the Eberly Center.
Create interdependence
Devote time specifically to teamwork skills
Build in individual accountability
Create interdependence
While some instructors don’t mind if students divvy up tasks and work separately, others expect a higher degree of collaboration. If collaboration is your goal, structure the project so that students are dependent on one another. Here are a few ways to create interdependence:
Strategy
Example
Ensure projects are sufficiently complex that students must draw on one another’s knowledge and skills. In one course on game design, group assignments require students to create playable games that incorporate technical (e.g., programming) and design skills. To complete the assignment successfully, students from different disciplines must draw on one another’s strengths.
Create shared goals that can only be met through collaboration. In one engineering course, teams compete against one another to design a boat (assessed on various dimensions such as stability and speed) by applying engineering principles and working within budgetary and material constraints. The fun and intensity of a public competition encourages the team to work closely together to create the best design possible.
Limit resources to compel students to share critical information and materials. In a short-term project for an architectural design course, the instructor provides student groups with a set of materials (e.g., tape, cardboard, string) and assigns them the task of building a structure that conforms to particular design parameters using only these materials. Because students have limited resources, they cannot divide tasks but must strategize and work together.
Assign roles (.doc) within the group that will help facilitate collaboration. In a semester-long research project for a history course, the instructor assigns students distinct roles within their groups: one student is responsible for initiating and sustaining communication with the rest of the group, another with coordinating schedules and organizing meetings, another with recording ideas generated and decisions made at meetings, and a fourth with keeping the group on task and cracking the whip when deadlines are approaching. The instructor rotates students through these roles, so that they each get practice performing each function.
Devote time specifically to teamwork skills
Don’t assume students already know how to work in groups! While most students have worked on group projects before, they still may not have developed effective teamwork skills. By the same token, the teamwork skills they learned in one context (say on a soccer team or in a theatrical production) may not be directly applicable to another (e.g., a design project involving an external client.)
To work successfully in groups, students need to learn how to work with others to do things they might only know how to do individually, for example to...
assess the nature and difficulty of a task
break the task down into steps or stages
plan a strategy
manage time
Students also need to know how to handle issues that only arise in groups, for example, to:
explain their ideas to others
listen to alternative ideas and perspectives
reach consensus
delegate responsibilities
coordinate efforts
resolve conflicts
integrate the contributions of multiple team members
Here are a few things you can do both to help students develop these skills and to see their value in professional life.