Surveys of employers routinely point to the value of preparing college graduates to be effective team players. As educators, we’ve responded with a now-familiar solution: the group project. But too many of us operate under the comfortable delusion that we are teaching teamwork skills merely by assigning group projects.
The reality: We ask students to exercise their leadership and interpersonal muscles, but we rarely offer any instruction on how to operate effectively in a group. And although we evaluate the results of each project, we tend to provide little or no feedback on how well they performed within their group.
What are the consequences? One of them is that most students don’t greet the prospect of a group project with anything close to enthusiasm. The usual reaction is a mix of groans and eye rolling — confirmation that students generally loathe these assignments.
Students offer varied reasons for that reaction. Group projects tend to eat up a lot of time outside of class. If the project is not especially well designed or clearly linked to the course objectives, students assume they won’t succeed or learn anything meaningful. Group work gets castigated as a waste of time. Then of course, high-achieving students complain that they end up doing the bulk of the work to produce a successful project when other group members prove uncooperative, unreliable, or lazy. The slackers accurately predict that an A-seeking student will swoop in to save the day.
It’s always tempting to abandon a teaching practice that generates such antagonism. But teamwork is a skill worth teaching and learning. As faculty members who have long incorporated group projects into our courses, we offer the following suggestions for how to optimize students’ learning of a skill that remains highly valued both in life and in work.
Link group projects to future success on the job. Students who are nervously watching their loan debt pile up are right to be concerned about gainful employment after graduation. So lay the foundation for a more optimistic attitude toward group projects by explaining the practical value of knowing both how to function well within a group and how to get a group to function well. You could even invite local employers to a class session to talk about teamwork and/or to listen in on group deliberations or final project presentations. That way you show students the usefulness of the exercise and connect them to employers who can offer advice or discuss job prospects.
Improvise a model of a dysfunctional group. Before you divide students into groups for a long-term project, provide a model of what can go wrong. Pick a simple topic — one that students have strong feelings about yet is not too divisive, such as what to do about a lack of student parking on the campus. Then recruit some brave volunteers from the class to role play as the “worst” group in academic history. Assign one student to strive to be functional and keep the group on track but encourage the others to improvise by letting their id monsters loose (e.g., be uncooperative, nitpick or disagree with every idea, check their cellphones constantly). Keep this intentional fiasco short, and then spend some time discussing what went wrong. Identify team-based strategies that they could use to prevent such problems in their real group projects.
Have students practice how not to cooperate in a group. This exercise is a more-focused version of the previous one. Internal conflict derails many a group project and students don’t always know how to manage a troublemaker. So give them practice. Have groups meet in class to do a short task related to their project. Assign a member of each group to cause trouble — that is, engage in at least one simple act of disruption or distraction during the discussion. You can easily stipulate that people born in July or those with middle names that have an “e” in them should attempt the troublemaker role. When the session concludes, invite students to share ideas on how they coped and got the group back on track.
Guide their group discussions with a structured list of questions. Students often rush to exchange opinions on the project topic before clarifying what the problem is or deciding on the best way to go about approaching it. By handing out a list of questions to guide their thinking, you encourage students to take the time to lay out a plan of attack that could reduce complications later on. Start with: “What is the best way to accomplish the task?” or “What is our end goal, anyway?” Similarly, suggest that they monitor their progress as the discussions unfold: “Are we making progress in solving the problem, or spinning our wheels?” At the conclusion of the project, another helpful question emerges: “How effectively have we achieved what we set out to do?” or “What could we have done better?”
Dedicate precious class time to group projects. Most of the work will happen outside of class. But by devoting at least some class time to group projects, you reinforce their importance and open the way for some creative intervention. For example, when you allot class time for group meet-ups, stop the discussion at the midpoint and ask for a status check. Is each group making progress? By doing so, you are modeling the importance of monitoring group dynamics. Similarly, reporting the foibles or successes exhibited by various groups enlightens students about what strategies are likely to be most successful.
Enlist students to provide feedback to one another. It’s daunting for a faculty member to try to assess individual group members on their teamwork skills. You very likely have a limited window to observe them in action within their group. You can spread the assessment burden by asking students — upon the completion of some phase of the project — to turn to the team member on their right and identify one or two ways that the person contributed to getting this part of the job done. That feedback can be recorded if you want to monitor its scope and quality; however, even in the absence of instructor confirmation, the feedback provides some meaningful attention to the improvement of teamwork skills. Such feedback is also an effective way to build cohesion and respect among team members for long-term projects.
Ask groups to rotate the leadership role. This strategy is especially important if the groups are working on a project for a whole quarter, a semester, or even a year. Encourage students to take turns leading the group, and ask group members to support anyone for whom a leadership opportunity generates anxiety. Good leaders are not born — they are shaped by meaningful experiences that sometimes produce growing pains.
Conduct equity reviews at the end of major projects. To discourage “social loafing” — a term used by psychologists to describe “the tendency for individuals to put forth less effort when they are part of a group” — inform students that their peers will be rating the quality and reliability of their contributions. Ask students to provide an “effectiveness” rating for each group member, with the student who contributed the most getting “100-percent effort” and everyone else in the group measured accordingly. As the instructor, you can adjust downward the grades of students whose effectiveness ratings are low. If you adopt this strategy, be ready to resolve significant differences of opinion that will arise on occasion among group members’ ratings. However, the boldest social loafers will typically be called out for that behavior by their dissatisfied peers.
Require self-assessment. Ask students to identify specific teamwork skills that they should be trying to refine over the course of a class project — for example, volunteering a viewpoint, challenging misinformation, seeking consensus, delegating responsibilities, debating possible solutions before selecting one, and monitoring the quality of group processes. All of those teamwork skills will transfer effectively into the workplace. By the project’s end, the members of each group should have a compelling story to tell about how the team evolved and tackled the work. Each team member should also be able to account for the progress they made on skills important for their own individual development. Those parallel narratives could be included in project-related course papers.
Those narratives might even come in handy during a job search. Students could potentially adapt the narratives they wrote for use in cover letters to send to prospective employers. During job interviews, students could recount how their group-project adventures developed their teamwork skills and discuss the successes and errors that became learning moments. Who knows? Students who once disparaged the group-project assignment might come to appreciate how it prepared them to function in the real world of teamwork.