Group work: Well-intentioned but poorly executed

Back in school, the mention of group work would be met with a series of reverberating groans. Now, in university, we may not audibly make a fuss, but we do complain about it behind closed doors. There’s a lot not to like about it, be it the often-unruly dynamic of assigned groups consisting of concerned and indifferent students, the social pressure of coming up with one’s own groups, or the extra work over the weekend or vacation periods.

It would be easy for me to say that I hate group work. Indeed, I do often say this.

As someone who likes control, group work is nightmare fuel. As it is expected to be assessed as a group, collaboration is a significant parameter. Indeed, most of the time, one won’t be graded, but an unsavoury, uninspired, and out-of-sync presentation will lead to minus brownie points for scholarly reputation with your seminar tutors.

Group work often isn’t an exciting venture to collaborate with someone. It is extra work I want to get off my plat

After all, group work has a great purpose and intent behind it. It can add a bit of life into an otherwise indifferent seminar group. It can equip students who might be shy or control-driven to change their approach or invite otherwise unbothered students to pull their weight. It can lead to us learning new perspectives because our collaborators might raise some truly intriguing and compelling points. The problem is, we don’t often achieve this objective. A study conducted in 2023 indicates that while group work is a good tool to educate students, a majority of students do not prefer it.

Perhaps this is because, while professors and teachers have good intentions, we, as students are a bit too busy to see the extent of this. For me, group work often isn’t an exciting venture to collaborate with someone. It is extra work I want to get off my plate. It’s an item on a perpetually increasing to-do list, sandwiched somewhere between “groceries” and “3,500-word essay due in two weeks.” Most students are in the same boat. Even if one of us were to put in a bit more initiative than the others, it doesn’t mean everyone will match that momentum. I couldn’t even blame them.

Indeed, the aforementioned study confirms that especially since pandemic, group work is treated less favourably by students due to, “efficiency, satisfaction, motivation and workload”.

This, however, isn’t always true. Group work can work, and when it works, it works. As someone enrolled in film-related modules, I had to shoot a short sequence for my film, and really, to do any production work, collaboration is crucial when you want everything to be time efficient and seamless. In this case, working with a team was great. I ended up working with a person who was excited about working on this project with me, and was keen to come up with something high in quality, from camera-work to acting, lighting, and editing.

The intention behind this is positive, as it involves pairing students with newer people so they interact with a diverse range of people

In my opinion, the most prominent part of this was the shared level of enthusiasm. This is what can sometimes be missing in the conventional group work set-up. No one seems to have the motivation, me included, to make anything more out of it than a set of slides. No inputs on anyone else’s contributions, no drive to set up an in-person meeting to discuss it over coffee. Just a group chat, or worse yet, an e-mail thread.

The lack of motivation is a significant roadblock, and this might be especially prevalent when we’re paired with people we might not know very well. But the intention behind this is positive, as it involves pairing students with newer people so they interact with a diverse range of people. A Times Higher Education article posits that a lot wrong with group work can indeed be about selection — random selection might result in an incompatible team, but groups consisting of pre-existing friends might cause others to feel excluded.

It is also easy for all of us, staff and students, to decide it isn’t crucial to dwell too much on group work. Just ‘get it over with.’ At the end of the day, it is a thirty-minute task, most of the time. Of course, it’s tempting to say that, but then there would have been no point of group work. If we can all admit it is a frustrating, ineffective and often poorly-executed tool, why not just do our own research all the time?

Though it might be tempting to chalk it all down to students (through reasons like lack of motivation, workload etc.), it’s never that easy. When I have felt like audibly groaning at the mention of group work, it’s typically because the premise is also dull, chiefly: “make a presentation summarising this topic.” Thankfully, I haven’t received such a prompt in a while, but I have heard this from friends on other courses.

In a professional setting, when we find ourselves working with different groups, or if we want to take a big idea forward, we’ll have to work with people

Group work could easily be exciting if its premise is intriguing: make a short presentation and follow it with a Kahoot quiz, game-ify the concepts, integrate the topic into an art form (make a poem, story, rap-verse, art-piece), go off-book, or focus on an interesting phenomenon. The only thing is, the deadline might have to become more lenient, but from the premise itself, it will be easy for group members to be creative.

Giving the group some time to interact in the classroom could also work. This might allow members to get to know each other (albeit, not without some small-talk and awkward pauses to start off with), but if the group work has an interesting topic, it could break the ice. Awkward as it may be, it will still be more productive than settling it through a series of e-mails.

Group work can work. Sometimes it is the only thing that can work. In a professional setting, when we find ourselves working with different groups, or if we want to take a big idea forward, we’ll have to work with people. Indeed, even in the real world, it doesn’t always work: it can only work if everyone wants it to work.