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Prepare your Students for Group Work

emmaleighamunro
Jul 1, 2015
2 min read

According to Google, group work is a form of cooperative learning. It aims to cater for individual differences, develop students' knowledge, generic skills (e.g. communication skills, collaborative skills, critical thinking skills) and attitudes. Group work has great intentions but so often goes so wrong, even though a majority of groups do pull off their work you can bet that the journey to get there wasn't always so smooth.

In theory group work is an excellent tool to use in the classroom and many instructors do. The biggest problem is that students expect it to be a good time, where they can do less work since they have other students to help them do their work. But that is actually not the case. There is typically more work that will take more effort than if working individually and there is a life cycle to group work where the arguing stage is inevitable. If we explain this to students ahead of time, their expectations will be more realistic, and they won't feel as if their team has failed because they argued a lot.

In 1965 Bruce Tuckman came up with a model that defines the life cycle of a group. The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing - Adjourning model of group development are the phases necessary and inevitable in order for the team to grow, to face up to challenges, to tackle problems, to find solutions, to plan work, and to deliver results. Adjourning was added to the model in 1977 with help from Mary Ann Jensen and can sometimes be replaced with Mourning if the project fails.