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Teamwork works… when everyone actually works. 😄

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Honestly, I have mixed feelings about group projects. On one hand, I enjoy them because they allow different ideas to come together and sometimes the final result becomes much stronger than what one person could do alone. I’ve experienced this in research projects and team activities where collaboration really helped us solve problems faster.

On the other hand, group projects can be frustrating when the workload is not equally shared or when communication is poor. One person often ends up doing more work than others.

Overall, I think group projects work best when everyone is clear about their roles and responsibilities. When that happens, they can actually be fun and very productive.

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Teamwork works… when everyone actually works.

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This gif captures my immediate thoughts regarding group projects. As a student, I've generally had good teammates and some of them were truly fantastic. As instructors, we now get to see both sides. My in-person classes seem to have a smattering of everything in terms of group dynamics, with some getting along very well, others that hardly ever talk to each other, and a large percentage in between. The sampling of group dynamics doesn't seem to change much in an online setting, but the isolating moments seem to be amplified.

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Reflecting on my group project experience from college to PhD, I had really positive experiences! I got the chance to work with cool classmates or weird classmates that I admire, or someone I would NEVER connect with in my whole life. This picture describes my group project experiences very well.

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Honestly for me it just depends on the point of group work (as in, is there a point, and is that point convincingly communicated to the folks doing group work?). Thinking about my own context, I do a lot of group-based work in my job, but my learning is mostly non-credit professional development where I'm going in with a specific need/goal in mind, and trying to fit my learning into limited time in my schedule. I love the group work that I do in my job - it's rewarding, leads to better work than I could dream up on my own, and helps me build meaningful relationships with colleagues I wouldn't otherwise connect with in such a deep way. I rarely get the same satisfaction when I have to do group work in learning environments - even though I understand why instructors do it, and even though as someone who supports instructors I'm frustrated when I see students not engage in group work that we've painstakingly thought out!

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I like them, but not for online courses. It's very hard to monitor group work and students are often in different time zones. I've found group work very difficult to implement in my online courses.

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As a teacher, I love group work. I believe building community is one of the most important factors in student buy-in and motivation, especially in online environments. At the same time, I understand the resistance. As a student, I was often the one who ended up doing all the work, so I recognize the groans that follow whenever I introduce a group project. Over the years, I’ve experimented with ways to address those concerns. I use group contracts, grade students only on the responsibilities they commit to (which reduces anxiety if the project falls short), and most recently, I structure groups so students regularly support one another while producing individual work. This seems to be the best model I've found so far.

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As a student, I always had a love-hate relationship with group projects. If you got lucky and were assigned to a group with good dynamics, they could be very collaborative, with an equally spread workload. However, if the group dynamics were unbalanced (which seems to more often be the case), it ended up being more work for the contributing members, while others disappeared for the duration of the project. Further, I found that each member really only learned the content they were responsible for, not the entire assignment. For these reasons, I've tried to stay away from group projects as an instructor. I do like group work - such as pair & shares or breakout rooms in class - but an entire project seems to turn out dysfunctional and frustrating more often than not.

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Group projects can be a really fun or a really frustrating opportunity. They're entirely dependent on balancing group dynamics with motivation and shared goals. As an instructor, it feels crucial to anticipate and plan for the ways group dynamics can play out and impact the individual team members.

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Overall, I have had a positive experience with project groups, with exceptions. People have different abilities and skills. So, it is natural, depending on the scope of the project groups, that one will communicate more, the other will take leadership, the other will put the hands-on, etc.

Failure in the design and communication of the project group objectives/outcomes affects the effectiveness of this approach.