Author: Bob Squillace
In its list of high-impact educational practices, the American Association of Colleges and Universities lists “Collaborative Assignments and Projects,” explaining briefly that,
Collaborative learning combines two key goals: learning to work and solve problems in the company of others, and sharpening one’s own understanding by listening seriously to the insights of others, especially those with different backgrounds and life experiences. Approaches range from study groups within a course, to team-based assignments and writing, to cooperative projects and research.
Whatever its long-term benefits in developing the ability to collaborate, however, anyone who has attempted a group project knows the immediate effect is often disastrous: students complaining that a team member did little work; students complaining that their team left them out of important meetings and decisions; students claiming that they were matched with students on the inaccessible other side of campus; instructors having to adjudicate disputes between team members (and adjust deadlines on the fly); final results that often seem significantly less than the sum of their parts. Indeed, one suspects that the AAC&U chose the term “collaborative learning” in part because the words “group project” have developed such negative connotations after decades of failed attempts to get students to work together productively outside the classroom without constant oversight.
In my experience, group projects tend to fail when they subject students to an artificial mode of working together – specifically, when students are simply told to work together in a small group on a common assignment (whether presentation, research project, or paper) with no differentiation of roles or responsibilities. Under such circumstances, there is no particular advantage to working collectively; while certain kinds of physical labor benefit from the presence of additional bodies and a chorus grows louder with additional voices, the fundamental reason to do collaborative intellectual work is to divide responsibilities so that each member on a team can concentrate on the particular skill they bring to the project. Teams in which multiple members have the same role tend to be dysfunctional teams in the academic as in the administrative world.
Group projects sing when students have differentiated roles that are interlocked but not so mutually dependent that a poor performance in one area will undermine a partner’s ability to perform in another. In one recent course1, for instance, I assigned a group project whose goal was, working from a storyboard, to create an effective online presentation about the context of one of the texts we were studying. Since the class consisted of first-semester sophomores, who may yet benefit from suggestions for viable topics, I supplied a list from which to choose. Each team consisted of three members, with the following roles:
- The Researcher: responsible for finding at least three scholarly sources on the topic and supplying a one-paragraph summary and a page to page-and-a-half of quotations from each piece of source material, along with a list of sources documented MLA style.
- The Writer: responsible for writing a two to two-and-a-half page script for the screen-cast, broken down into short paragraphs, so that text could be paired with images by the director. The writer was encouraged to ask the researcher for additional material if they felt it necessary.
- The Director: responsible for storyboarding (finding and choosing appropriate images, graphs, or videos for each segment of text) and for recording and posting the screen-cast (any of the team members were allowed to serve as the on-screen talent). The director was encouraged to ask the writer for revisions in the script to fit the visual material better.
Rather than having groups self-assemble (which can lead to students feeling left out), I assigned roles by first asking each student to rank their skills as Researcher, Writer, and Director on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent): I was then able to assign roles so that no student assumed a task for which they had not rated their skills at 4 or higher. The group then collectively chose its topic and work began.
Students were especially reassured by my being able to grade the work of each team member without reference to the quality of what the other members of their team had produced. Obviously, as the first link in the chain, the work of the researcher could be judged on its own merits. But so could that of the writer; the goal of their work was to develop a script that transformed the source materials provided them into a narrative framework that clearly explicated the subject in question. The quality of the script could thus be judged independently of the quality of the research (was the sequence of information clear and compelling? was the narrative clear? was the subject dramatized effectively?). Similarly, the role of the director was to transform the textual script into an effective visual presentation; this student’s work was judged on their success in mounting images appropriate to the text, arranging text and image effectively in space, and performing the narration in a manner that contributed to rather than distracting from the subject matter. The quality of the script did not determine the quality of the direction.
When asked on a midterm survey “What do you look forward to the most in the upcoming weeks?” 37.5% of students (6 of 16) named the storyboard presentations, making this assignment the most anticipated item in the course – more, even, than Captain America: The Winter Soldier, one of the popular culture films we studied near the end of the term.
This structure (which I have repeated in more advanced courses with equal success) is certainly not meant as the model assignment, but as a model for one type of assignment, with a specialized set of goals. It has limitations: it does not, for instance, give students experience in working through the whole process of scholarship, from identification of a topic to researching it to writing about it in a way that engages the prevailing discourse on the subject. Nor is it meant to do so; I design other assignments to address those needs. Rather, it helps students learn to collaborate in the ways that make real collaboration productive: working in a team where different specialists bring their own expertise to bear on a common project. That every student in a group depends on team members performing a different kind of task from themselves also instills a greater sense of responsibility in each – the researcher, say, cannot bank on the writer patching over whatever shoddy work they might contribute because they are not working together on the same task, as in traditional group projects where roles are not differentiated and the final product is assessed as the equal product of all. And, while the artifact the group finally produces is not assessed in itself, the excitement of working in a team in which each member perceived themselves as the group expert has led to much better final results than I have seen with other student presentations, whether created individually or in groups. The division of labor really does make work work.
1 An introductory survey of the global arts from the early 18th century to the present.