<p>I’ll be interested to see how this turns out if the OP chooses to report back.</p>
<p>But I don’t agree with the notion that school group projects are good practice for later workplace experiences.</p>
<p>School group project situations vary markedly from workplace project situations. Usually workplace projects have a project manager or someone who is (at least nominally) in charge, while school projects often (usually) have a group of peers working together. Workplace projects usually incorporate people with varying levels of experience both with the project subject matter and with the firm; school projects are most often the blind leading the blind, and I suspect that this is where many of the projects first go off course. Workplace projects most frequently involve people working at the same location on the same shift (though this isn’t true of some complex projects), while school projects often throw together students whose schedules don’t overlap much except for the hours in which they’re in the same course. In a business situation, if someone isn’t pulling their own weight, the project manager ought to ride herd, in a school situation you have peers trying to ride herd on peers, which isn’t likely to be effective unless the kids have received training and support in how to do this.</p>
<p>I’m not averse to students learning through group projects, but I fear that what they most often learn is that they hate group projects. If we really wanted to set up group projects with the goal of having them be effective learning environments, I think we’d do more to set them up in a way that is likely to be successful, and which would teach them techniques other than doing all the work for the team members who didn’t participate. Lord of the Flies may be a good novel, but it is not a good model for how kids ought to learn teamwork.</p>