I just got my syllabus for a class I’m taking and it has us working in pairs. For an art class. sigh. So this thread has suddenly become very timely for me.
I know one kid who is taking the class that will want to glom onto me for the project, and she never has her stuff together. I’ve already prepared my rejection: “we have different ways of working, and we won’t mesh well on this project.”
This class (surrealist art in media) suddenly went from being my most anticipated class of the summer to my most dreaded. Awesome.
D used the same tactics as @lspreacker. She had a lot of group projects and often had a dud in the group (even in pairs). The dud wasn’t always obvious; sometimes it was a top student who just didn’t know what to do (because they were always told what to do?) Anyway, she often took charge, assigned roles and tasks and set due dates. If she ran into resistance or found the other student wasn’t doing their work, she would update the teacher. A couple of times, she did what lspreacker did - finished the work, and let the partner hang to dry during oral presentations. She would step in and answer questions directed toward the partner so that the entire class and/or judge (often they had outside evaluators) as well as the teacher knew.
This is a life lesson all students need to learn - pull your weight, and what to do when you are pulling others’ weight. You know how the hardworking kids know who the slackers are? Guess what, these slackers also know who will do “all the work”. They know with who they can get away with not doing the work.
.I never contacted other parents and no parent had ever contacted me - except for the parents of a big time slacker. I found out why - these parents took over the entire group project and did all the kids’ work. (My daughter was furious when she found out the mother “proofread and edited” the powerpoint file and introduced typos during the presentation.
Over the years, my kids have bemoaned group projects gone awry. I would then torture them with one of my favorites lines: Dear, LIFE is a group project!
Collaborative learning is becoming a bigger part of education so get use to the group projects as more and more curricula will emphasize them in the future including colleges. Real life will involve collaboration so kids need to learn how to work in teams and what to do when members don’t pull their weight or are ineffective even if they do try hard. That leadership quality that colleges say they like to see can be developed more effectively in a group project dynamic when there are legitimate consequences on the other end (grades) as opposed to something like being President of some club. These are not reasons to fear or run but great opportunities for real learning - seize them.
“Group project” are dirty words in our house! My kids have tried various strategies to combat the slackers, and most are either ineffective or fail to achieve the primary goal, which is not having to do all the work oneself. I’m sorry, but letting the teacher know you did it all and getting “credit” for that doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t solve the time management problem of one kid now having to do the work of 2 or 3 students when he is very busy and can’t spare the time. Besides, you aren’t going to get more than an A+ for it, and the teacher of that class can’t somehow compensate you for the time you had to rob from your other courses while you were doing far more than your share in his or her class. Not only that, but our teachers have begun a very obnoxious practice of incorporating into the grading rubric a criterion for “group members worked an equal number of hours,” as evidenced by an attahced time sheet. So now if the kids are honest about Jimmy and Susie not showing up by docking them hours on the time sheet, then they must accept a lower grade for that rubric line. Talk about adding insult to injury!
Yes…real life and jobs do require collaborative work…but in real life and JOBS…guess what? You are usually working at the same site, and at the very least are expected to do your collaboration during your work day.
These group projects often exoect students to ferret out common time outside of the school day.
Or school recognized the importance of grou work…BUT they now require that the bulk of the actual cooperative work take place during the school day. Just like in “real life”. Folks are still exoected to do research and get relevant information for the projects outside of school. Just like employees are exoected to bring knowledge to the table.
But the actual cooperative meshing of the project is done at school.
I mean really…how many employers assign folks to complete cooperative projects outside of the work day…expecting the adults to work around their own lives, family commitments, and the like.
Our kid was, last minute, assigned a group project over Thanksgiving week. We left out of the country, Friday nught, returning the following Sunday. Teachers needs to know that students may have other things going on.
Trust me, as a teacher who sits in the audience for group presentations, it’s very very obvious who did the work. And yes, that factors into the grade.
I recall a project when kids came to our house, as we are in walking distance from HS. Also, I have all kinds of supplies and like crafts. Everyone was picked up between 5:30 & 6, except a boy in nearest neighborhood. I offered to drive him home, as we wanted to eat dinner. His mother finally came for him at 8:00. The next time they got together, I drove him home.
The only group,project that was fun was when a few of the boys had to make a film of something silly. I put a wig and make up on one boy, another got my leather jacket and slicked back hair. It was done in an afternoon, amidst lots of giggles.
I’d unfortunately call that a bad school but my perspective is skewed for a number of reasons. As an IT professional collaborative work is more and more important and learning how to work those dynamics are important. I see what happens to the staff that can’t do that.
Also my daughter attends a project based high school. I see the positive benefits of this type of learning. She hasn’t always gotten the best team members but because of the type of school and that it’s a special admit school so students are both self selected because they like projects and school selected based on how well they fit the school her “bad” experiences most likely aren’t at the level some of your kids have experienced. The kids learn and become better and it’s not always from the teachers and staff but also the team members using their leadership skills to bring up the slackers.
I find it funny how MotherOfDragons says the group projects aren’t real life. My daughter’s Principal likes to say how once someone mentioned that the high school prepared students for real life and he shot back that the school is real life - one team’s environmental science project led to a cease and desist order by the EPA at a local construction site when they monitored the runoff and one my daughters projects led to a city wide advertising campaign for ex-convicts concerning voting rights just to name a couple of real life examples.
As thumper1 says it can be done better. It would help if teachers got better training in how to use documentation and instruct the students. Getting the teams to make simple project plans in class and getting sign off from each member so that responsibilities are specifically itemized with due dates would help immensely. I can see why some teachers added the "equal number of hours rule’ as it defeats the purpose of a group project if one person does all the work. That doesn’t help if the teacher can’t instruct the students better in how to get participation buy in.
^^Yeah I should amend my statement by saying I haven’t experienced anything like group projects in my work life, but it’s probable that some careers do encounter it all the time.
I may have self-selected away from collaborative careers. I hate delegating, and I hate telling people to do their job.
Does an employer care if everyone on the team works equal hours, or do they just want the work to get done?
For most of my high school group projects, the overhead required for getting everyone to work together exceeded the amount of extra effort I had to put in to do it all myself. Enforcing group methods for tasks that are really too small for it puts students into the habit and expectation of spending more time planning the work than actually performing it, which becomes a huge time management problem when they are faced with a task that actually does require cohesive teamwork. All talk, no action.
My entire career is built around collaborative work, and I have never encountered the frustration in “real life” group work that I did with school work. With school group work there are two goals: finishing the work and fulfilling the “group requirements.” These are sometimes (or often) at odds with each other.
The big issue we had with group projects where 1 member doesn’t do anything is that all the teachers make the students sign a school pledge that they are honest about who did what. So they either have to lie and break a pledge or they have to basically all rat out the kid who didn’t do their part. Before the pledge people just let the others get away with it but after the pledge started when my oldest was in 10th grade they quickly started telling on whoever didn’t work and that caused even more group drama and angst because some didn’t want to tell.
In HS, this could be a pain. In college it was easy. We built a group of six in our major who were dependable and scheduled our classes so there was generally 3-4 of us. Worked great.
For someone who mentioned work, I find it harder in work because if you are on a team project and have colleagues who either don’t pull their weight or just don’t have the skills for the project it can be a pain. Throwing someone under the bus isn’t good for a variety of reasons and if the project doesn’t meet deadlines and/or quality, you suffer with the team. I’ve picked up other’s slack many times. I think supervisors realize who the folks are who can get things done but that doesn’t mean that it’s not painful at times.
@raneck An employer cares about it getting done in time and on budget - that generally requires that multiple people do the work they need to do and 1 person can’t do everything. Every where I’ve worked we’ve always had more projects than we can get done so we are never lacking for work.
Part of doing group projects in high school and college is learning group project management and dynamics so there is obviously an overhead for that and depending on the scale of the project it might be more than the project. It’s a step in learning. It’s better to learn project management on a small scale, low risk project than know nothing and have to do your senior project that might be a year long project. It’d be like writing a Senior Thesis with no research skills.
My main point is just to present an alternative view on the whole high school group project issue. Instead of bemoaning them and calling for their end the message to teachers/administration is that teachers need more training in using them effectively and instructing/helping students better with issues that occur.
I am a project manager for a living, and school projects are not like real life. Part of work projects is usually status reporting, and it is pretty easy to point out what part is not getting done to management. Many times that gets results – and at least the whole team is not tarred when it causes issues.
When D1 was an intern at an investment bank, they were assigned to do a group project. Each member had to present to a committee as part of their evaluation for the final job offer. There was a member who was too busy to do a lot of work. Few days before the presentation, this intern emailed other members for the final presentation. D1 told him she would do it when she got a chance, and so did other members. Because it was very competitive to get an offer, no one felt compelled to share the presentation with this non-contributing member.
In real life, people can often pick and choose who they want to work on a project. If someone is a weak link then he/she will be replaced. Therefore I think teachers should also allow students to pick their own group.
That’s like saying high school research is not like grad school research. It’s a step in the process. At my daughter’s school the major projects have status reports to the teacher. Like I said - it can be done better than the cases in this thread people are complaining about. Better training for teachers in how to use group projects is key.