Why You Should Limit Group Work Smart Classroom Management

For students who are motivated and determined to do well, group work is an exercise in frustration and unfairness. They do all or most of the work.

Yet the grade is shared.

And although they would love to say, “No, I’m not doing it all this time,” they know in the end that it will only cause their own grade to suffer.

So they buck up and do it.

They swallow their resentment and shoulder the responsibility to organize, create, and develop ideas and then do the actual work of writing, building, presenting, etc.

If you believe in keeping the healthy pressure of responsibility on all students, then you’ll take no part in the charade. Y0u’ll take no part in hitching high-achieving students to those who view group work as a way to skate by.

The students all know this. They’re far more aware of the sham of group work than their teachers, who either have their heads in the sand or know better but choose not to do anything about it.

If you doubt this, pull any one of your students aside before or after class and ask them. If they’re comfortable with you, they’ll let you have it. And it’ll be worse than you imagined.

So what should you do about it?

Limit its use.

Group work is overrated. Yes, there is a place for it. Students should have some consistent exposure working with others. But the level to which it’s relied on, and how it’s carried out in most classrooms, is a waste of time.

Individual skills in reading, writing, and math should far and away be the priority. Throwing students below grade level into time-eating groups where they contribute almost nothing makes little sense.

It’s merely time spent away from what they really need.

So check the box minimally required by your curriculum standards and leave it at that. Have students meet for five minutes a day instead of 40. Or better yet, have them meet once a week.

Put guardrails up.

There are things you can do to keep the weight of responsibility on every student while they’re working in groups. Although I’m happy to share a complete list in a future article, here are two of the easiest:

1. Make it a discussion.

Have your students meet in groups to discuss the progress of their individual projects. They can share problems and obstacles and help each other out, which has legitimate value. The actual work, however, is done on their own.

2. Assign roles.

Give each student a clear role or part in a group project they’re solely responsible for and graded on but doesn’t require the finished work of any other member. They then present just their portion.

Don’t give a group grade.

Give grades based on the individual work that is produced. Although counterintuitive, this tact produces far better and higher quality than giving every student the same group grade.

It’s also fair and will never cause resentment.

I know that some teachers lump everyone’s grade together to raise the average of poorer students, but all this does is hide the truth and damage the very students they believe they’re helping. A hybrid individual/group grade is likewise a bad idea.

If you do have to provide a mark for how well they work in groups, then create a rubric that reflects these soft skills—like staying on-task, listening to others, actively participating, etc.—and check them off according to your observations.

Question Everything

We have this habit in education of doing things just because we’ve always done them or because it makes sense on the surface.

Dig a little deeper and much of it just isn’t very good.

Group work is a perfect example, at least the way it’s most commonly used. Yet, this giant time-waster is trotted out year after year to the misery of a few dedicated students and the giggling irresponsibility of others.

We trust the knowledge of professional development trainers and other district-approved experts, assuming they know best. But they’re just parroting what they’ve been told.

Few are original thinkers willing to question the status quo and fewer still test the effectiveness of their grandiloquence in an actual classroom.

Great teachers and administrators are skeptical.

They question and test everything to determine what really works. They don’t buy into the unfairness is fairness routine. They don’t assume that group work, rotation centers, open-ended math, or community circles, for example, have any benefit whatsoever without deep thought and experimentation.

They analyze the level of captivation each lesson or learning method has on students and the quality of the product produced. They adjust every detail and perfect over time until they get it right.

Then they figure out a way to do it even better.

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