Group Work: Best Practices

• Make teamwork a stated course outcome; provide them with a simple rationale.
• Cite the research
• Consider your language. Do you want groups or teams?
• Tell them it builds community and helps students be more successful in their classes
  • Online students regularly cite the lack of community as a reason for not completing their studies. While group work obviously is not the whole answer to this issue, it can help students feel closer to each other.
  • Beaudoin found that "witness learners, those who never appear in module conference discussions, almost always actively participate in study group activities even when the group work is not graded." Brindley, Walti, and Blaschke support this finding.
  • Major contends that, because collaborative learning requires students to work with each other, it can help reduce feelings of isolation (253).
• Demonstrate the real-life benefits of the team work
  • Patti Shank cites the changing nature of the workplace as a viable reason to assign groupwork. Work today increasingly involves "tasks done alongside other tasks and under complex conditions and distractions, competing demands and the need to continually prioritize and reprioritize, and complex decisions made with changing and sometimes contradictory information."
  • According to Jan Engle, working in teams contributes to the development of critical and thorough thinking skills, encourages consideration of multiple perspectives, and "generates solutions that are typically better than what one student can develop working individually."
  • Palloff & Pratt cite the pedagogical benefits of collaborative learning as "development of critical thinking skills, co-creation of knowledge and meaning, reflection, and transformative learning." A major benefit of assigning group work in any course is that pairing students allows them to work to their strengths; "different learning styles and cultures can be accommodated more easily because effective collaborative learning values diversity."

Read about team configuration and the process of forming teams from Penn State University.

Google's experiment demonstrates the need for teams to start working together casually; consider creating a short assignment or discussion board question when groups form initially to "break the ice" and get students connecting on a personal level.

Hanna outlines one approach to selecting groups: "Some instructors form groups based on feedback from students about their skills and preferences. After explaining the project requirements, instructors may [ask students to] submit a one minute paper in class indicating their preferred roles in the group and their reasons for selecting this role. In online environments, students could use the discussion forum areas to submit the same information or the instructor may send an electronic survey...After, instructors could divide the groups based on the input they collected from students."

According to Brindley, Walti, and Blaschke, "students who are assigned a group project without an adequate level of readiness and/or guidance may be set up for failure."

• "Strategies that can be used to increase cooperative learning in a course include forming small teams (3 to 4 students), setting clear expectations for assignments, identifying specific roles or jobs for team members, establishing norms of behavior early on, establishing norms of behavior early on, specify how team members should communicate and using what tools (e.g. wikis, discussion forums), defining how frequently team members should communicate with each other, providing for team reflections and evaluations, discussing how the team should communicate with the instructor, giving feedback, facilitating group formation, and providing sufficient time for tasks" (Johnson).
• Encourage students to talk to each other about rules for communication methods and timeliness, feedback, deadlines, etc. Consider providing a template or sample for creating a team charter.
• One method for creating an effective collaborative environment is to employ project management techniques. Hanna recommends providing students with a charter, work breakdown structure, and a discussion about leadership.

According to Kalay, the "characteristics of good creative collaboration are unique tasks, unpredictable results, shared understanding, communication, and joint decision-making."

• It is well known that instructor presence plays a significant role in both the success and satisfaction of online learners. Collaboration provides an opportunity for faculty to interact with students in an additional context while promoting "sense of community and emotional connectedness, through design and facilitation of the social and cognitive processes" (Stockleben).
• Providing feedback for each step of the assignment, including each student's attempts to communicate with the larger group is crucial: "You cannot be merely the 'teacher observer,' but rather you need to dive in as well: respond to some of the posts, offer suggestions, give kudos when appropriate. (Never chastise one student 'in front' of the other team member; rather, do this in private email). By doing this, the students can see that you walk the walk, not just talk the talk--and a combination of your presence and what you offer will truly help motivate them to stay active in teamwork!" (Sull 8).

Remember that students may not be aware of the best ways to communicate with each other. Consider providing them with a short list of tools for use in their collaborative efforts.

• Every JWU student and faculty member has a subscription to Microsoft's Office 365, which has many sharing capabilities that look similar to Google Drive or Dropbox, which students may be more familiar with.
• Check out this introduction to Google Hangouts if you think your students will benefit from this platform.
• Using a of social constructivist approach, Gila Kurtz explored Facebook as platform for student collaboration. Her analysis focuses on the use of groups and student perception of Facebook as an educational tool. Her findings indicate that, when compared to a course management system, the Facebook group "was perceived as a more appropriate environment for social learning processes and a more convenient environment to help struggling students and those with difficulties" (258). Additionally, students reported entering the Facebook group twice as often as the course management environment, probably due to its ease of access (259).

Brindley, Walti, and Blaschke reflect: "One proposed method of ensuring learner participation in online collaboration is to demonstrate the value of group learning by assessing both the product and process of group work."

"A large number of partners are using different kinds of peer review methods to strengthen empathy and knowledge exchange in creative project work....At Aalborg, for example, student teams mutually act as consultants, reviewing and commenting on different stages of a project. The design management programme at TAMK uses open blogs, so even the project progress is visible continually to other teams. Another effect of having a public blog is that the team has a common display of the state of the project, which can be discussed with teammates and external partners. This supposedly will lead to a better common understanding of project goals and ideas" (Stockleben).

"Free riders or social loafers in teams can be a source of particular frustration to students. While students can give feedback on team evaluations, having a process in place such as allowing members to 'divorce' themselves from a group has been found to have a strong effect on decreasing free riders" (Johnson).