The Dreaded Group Project

In my time in school, I have been involved in a variety of group projects over the years. It is usually something people groan about the most while in school, I've found-- "No, not another group project!"-- usually because a) it's hard to find times for everyone to work at together, b) it's harder to control the overall quality of the project if you are reliant on others to do good work for YOUR grade, and c) almost invariably, some members of the group do more of the heavy lifting, while others get to ride along without making much of a contribution.

Having said all that, however, they are important pedagogically, because they are good practice for what the working world is like. You have to be able to work with people, be collaborative and be willing to listen to others' ideas and contributions, even if you don't always agree with them. Nobody really gets to be their own little Napoleon in the working world; ya gotta be able to work with others.

In one group project I worked on in the last year or so, I felt we did have a number of the input, throughput, and output variables in common as noted in the "Effective Discussion Group" document. We all shared a purpose, had common interests and goals, were aware of each other and each other's ideas, and had suffient time to do our work ( a semester-long project.) However, we also shared a number of the same weaknesses-- we had prioritized work in other classes over this one, procrastinated a bit in the project, and, though our roles were equal, none of us really felt as though we could push one another when the crunch time for completing the project came. We were all just a little too laid back. As a result, though our project was interesting and a good topic for our purposes, the result (paper and presentation) left a little to be desired, I thought. If we had taken a little better advantage of the positive envrionmental factors we shared (recognized, well supplied with information,supported by our professors etc.) we could have done a little better. Nonetheless, at least we all learned a little something about prioritizing our time and energy better.