Love / Hate Group Work

Author: Danelle Rowley
Posted date: Monday, February 9, 2009 4:06:31 PM EST
Last modified date: Monday, February 9, 2009 4:06:31 PM EST
Total views: 2 Your views: 2


It's so funny to me, everytime I hear that we have to do a group project in a class, I think, "Oh no!" And I feel a little queasy in my stomach. But then as I'm working with the group, things seem to be coming together and I always have a really good experience, and I make new friends in the class. So the best thing you can do when you have to do group work is think of the worst thing that can happen, and you'll always be pleasantly surprised! LOL, or just come into the group with low expectations. I seriously don't endorse that, but there's still that trepidation that accompanies group assignments.

What can you do to make sure that everyone in the group carries their own weight (how have you dealt with social loafing in the past)?




In the past, I didn't always deal with social loafing the best. I just picked up the slack because I wanted the good grade and tried not to get paired with the same person again. Now I try to communicate, but always in a respectful, non-threatening sort of way, and try to motivate people to contribute to the group. This doesn't always work, but at least I tried.

It's good to break up assignments so that everyone is included, respond to everyone's comments, agree on a timeline, and keep refining the project or paper until it's ready to turn in and everyone's happy and satisfied. And communicate communicate communicate! And follow up.







I realized that I had a few group conflicts in some of my groups at Drexel. In one group, a member was not communicating with us at all. I think that she checked into the board once at the beginning of the group, but never again. I tried to e-mail her, I even got her number from the professor and called her phone but didn't get an answer. I was afraid something had happened to her. During this time, I was reporting to the group about the status of this student in our group, making sure they knew what was going on. The professor also tried to contact her. Finally the professor e-mailed me to say that the student had responded, and that she had had her baby early and needed a C-section, so she was bedridden in the hospital for awhile. I also got an email from the student. She tried to get back into the group and the swing of things, but it turned out that she had missed too much school to make up so she ended up dropping out of our group and those classes. Luckily we had parted on good terms and she ended up being in one of my classes the next term and we even worked in a group later and had a great experience.

Ironically, in the same group (we started out with 5 members), another member began to participate less and less, after this other group member with the baby. I e-mailed her about a deadline she had missed, and she told me that her grandfather had passed away. The group work progressed, and she still was not contributing, but she was still in the course. I didn't e-mail the professor about it, because I did not feel like it was my perrogative - the student herself should communicate her personal life to the teacher. If she needed grief counseling, she should seek it out. I worked with the other group members and basically I told them that since she hadn't been contributing on the majority of the assignment that I was not going to assess her well in our group assessment. They came to the same conclusion. We three group members finished strong and were happy with our project. (We made an interactive PowerPoint presentation for fifth grade geography where we addressed state standards through using Google Earth and USGS.gov.) I didn't even put this group member's name on the final project, as our professor instructed us to do in case we did have a group member who didn't contribute. I don't know what happened to this student. I hope that things came out okay for her, but it almost felt like she was making up an excuse for not doing her work. I feel this way because she failed to communicate. Maybe she was really struggling, but I had no way of knowing. I think this was the first bad group member assessment I had ever given, and so far, the only bad assessment.







What should you do when one member of the group is dominating the rest of the group?




I haven't had this problem yet at Drexel. Everyone is very good about sharing the work and not taking over. (Uh oh, unless I'M the one that is taking over the group!) This is tricky, I would say to just be assertive, to state explicitly what you want in the project, compromise, but make sure you get to do some work. I think that the worst thing you can do (but we often to it) is to just sit and fume in silence, but not ever say that you don't feel like your voice is being heard or valued. Of course, once again don't put people on the defensive. Try to use the nicest language you can and don't call out specific individuals, unless you've exhausted all other routes.






What have you done in the past to resolve conflict during a group project exercise?



There was this very conflicting group that I was a part of during my undergrad, it was in my intro to modern physics course, and it was two other ladies and one guy. The guy had a brilliant mind, but he was the most cantakerous soul. He was sitting by us, and we had just formed a group and decided he was sitting by himself and we should include him in our group. We asked him if he wanted to be in our group, and he rudely said, and I quote, "Well are you going to write a good paper?" We were all taken back, and we almost wanted to say, okay, never mind, find your own group. We were all pretty motivated women, so it was kind of a shocking thing for him to say to us. Basically he needed to work on his people skills. We still formed a group with him, although each of us butted heads with him at some point. I guess we were all still pretty patient. We did a lot of good research, and he practically played devil's advocate on everything we proposed, but it helped us form strong arguments and good organization in the paper, and we ended up writing the best paper in the class (On the Anti-Matter Plume in the Milky Way Galaxy, if you are interested). So in this case, this huge, daily group struggle ended up producing good results. He also had more respect for us. But I was stressed out for weeks on end. I'd rather produce a pretty good project that fulfills the teacher's criteria and not be stressing out.