On the official course evaluation form at my school, students tick a box that indicates whether the course involved group work. I get to tick off a separate box, in which I indicate whether I think group work is important for the course, but seeing that box there semester after semester naturally makes me think of more ways to do group work.
I don't remember doing very many group projects when I was in college. In a debate class, naturally, I needed a debate partner. I made a video in an internship class. (I wrote the script and another student, who was interning for a TV show, did all the editing, though for part of it I sat there and gave him suggestions.)
I posted Collaborative Academic Writing: Exploratory Thoughts on my blog, but in a nutshell, I'm thinking about a process whereby students who dislike group work can opt out of further group work by helping two different groups succeed. If your four-person collaborative paper succeeds, then you get a single partner and a new assignment the next work. If your two-person group succeeds, then the next week, you do the project alone.
It should be something fairly complex yet discrete skill, such as doing a close reading, or applying a literary theory to a primary text. The idea is that the students who feel they are doing all the work will be super-motivated to help two group projects succeed, so that they can free themselves from the misery of group work earlier. The students who really need to watch their peers perform a skill several times before they feel comfortable doing it themselves will get that chance.
Students who are not pulling their weight will end up together in large, confused groups, and I'll only have to suffer through marking a single lame paper (rather than a separate lame paper for each dead-weight student). Meanwhile the students who "get it" can move on to demonstrating their individual skills.
I'll have to work in some reward system so that students who demonstrate they "get it" early have some benefit (such as being excused from a quiz or getting to opt out of a practice paper). The idea is to cut down on the busywork (so that I won't have to grade busywork from students who don't need to do busywork), and save more of my time for the students who need the extra help.
I'll be teaching an American Lit survey with 35 students (which is a huge class by Seton Hill standards) and an upper-level Lit Crit survey with about 18 students. So I'm looking for creative ways to reduce the number of pages I have to mark.
group work in lit classes
I've used research groups in AmLit classes to research and present on the literary movements: people research various aspects--music, architecture, fashion, other important technologies, etc.--they create a handout (easier to collaborate on these days in Google docs) and they do a group presentation in which they introduce each other and then present their own findings.
Even folks who hate group work tend to enjoy this, and there's no disputing that everyone benefits from the presentations.
Your post also makes me think for the first time about the assumption that group work will be useful for students in their future jobs. The fact is, I've never done group work in the working world. In "real" jobs, there is a boss. In "real" jobs, you may have to work with someone to achieve something, but the buck always stops with one person.
Even when I was in middle management, if the job I assigned to someone did not get completed by a certain time, I had to do it myself. If we did group work that anticipated jobs outside of the academy rather than anticipating scholarly publishing, our groups would have a hierarchy: a group manager.
Thanks, Dennis, for your continued thought-provoking posts.