On Sundays, I meet with my U.S. and Vietnam class group to work on our project on Lyndon B. Johnson*. I love these meetings, to which we all arrive ten minutes early, prepared to enthusiastically present to each other our vigorous research filed away in neatly organized manila folders. Our passion for Lyndon B. Johnson is unmatched, our ideas for our final presentation flow like mountain streams and our willingness and ability to work cooperatively with one another is worthy of a children’s television show. Or at least that’s what it should be, and how I imagine our meetings play out in the mind of our professor, who like many professors here, has an unfailing confidence in the power of group work.
In reality, my group on Lyndon B. Johnson meets infrequently and reluctantly, and when over the course of five hundred emails we do manage to set a time and place to meet that works for everyone, inevitably someone sleeps through the meeting, or forgets, or has a surprise lacrosse practice. It shouldn’t be like this; the possibilities of group work are plenty.
This group in particular is composed of one freshman, one sophomore, one junior and one senior, which in it of itself is remarkable and tailor-made for some sort of brochure for the College. But for the four of us, as it is for many students, group work can be like slogging through tar, thick, black, Vietnam-war-era tar, with Google Docs and group emails and Powerpoints floating on the surface, sticking to our clothing and flooding our nightmares.
A recent study has shown that 85% of Conn students’ time outside of class is spent in group meetings and another 5% is spent emailing about them. While this statistic is entirely untrue, it reflects many students’ feelings about this part of our education with some accuracy. The lamentations can be heard all across campus: “I have a group meeting.” And if you don’t have a group meeting, your friend does. Something that is rarely heard: “I’m having a great experience working in a group!”
As with most articles of this nature, a degree of informal polling goes into its writing. In an effort to find the merit of group work, as I know there is some, I spoke to what I thought was a generous cross-section of students. Few people wanted to be quoted with their name attached, mostly because few people had positive things to say about working in groups.
Students, in fact, have some pretty nasty things to say. I spoke with a friend who had recently been an unwilling participant in a disastrous group project, and when I asked if in quoting her about her experience, her group members might be offended at being slandered in print, she said she wasn’t worried. She wasn’t worried because, as far as she could tell from working with them, they were illiterate and therefore wouldn’t be inclined to read a college newspaper anyway. She added also that the experience made her “lose all faith in people.”
If group work is a medicine that when effective, produces collaborative, educational bliss and soothes the burden and the isolation of working alone, it should be said that when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong. Side effects include crises of faith and a tingling feeling in the legs and ankles that makes you want to run to the Registrar’s Office to pick up a transfer form.
Juan Pablo Pacheco ’14 said in more eloquent terms something that nearly every student I spoke to expressed: “Our education system just isn’t designed for group work.” The most commonly called-upon rationale for group work by professors is that, “We will have to work in groups in the real world”—that is, if rationale is provided at all. However, as Pacheco wisely pointed out, group work in the future is an inevitability—but in the “real world,” in offices or film sets or wherever you may find yourself, “There is almost always a clear hierarchy, and you know exactly where you fall in it.” Not having a hierarchy isn’t necessarily bad, he said, but guidance is wanted. This idea resonated strongly with many, who said that the unclear structure of group projects makes for wasted time, slacking off and bad blood all around.
Other grievances surfaced. Variations on this idea emerged with some force: while some professors hold group work in the highest regard, others make the ability to work well with others seem as irrelevant as learning to herd sheep or administer leeching.
A class I took the spring of my freshman year comes to mind, which I will leave unnamed for obvious reasons. The professor announced on the first day of class that only two students would be recieving A’s; this was not a class where we would be coddled but rather judged against each other. His teaching style was dictatorial, arbitrarily calling on students for inane trivia, resulting in one of my classmates suffering through nearly every class in a perpetual state of immanent nervous collapse. Needless to say, we were not once asked to work in groups. This, I’ve found, is the exception, as most professors thankfully prefer to foster a more comfortable learning environment.
But what is more problematic than tyrannical professors are those teachers and classes that straddle the line between collaborative and individualistic learning in a confusing way. Should we prepare for a world that is cut-throat and competitive, or collaborative, kind and democratic? While we’re smart enough to know that it’s not always so clearly one or the other, students I spoke to reflected on the mixed signals in our education.
This is what students say, generally, about group work. Sometimes it works, and when it does, it’s a powerful approach to learning, and perhaps more significantly, a meaningful way to connect with other students. These successes are mostly felt to occur in upper level classes, with like majors, in groups of four people or under. It works especially in dance classes, and sometimes in the visual arts. Senior seminars are often the stage for smiling-picture-on-the-college-website-appropriate intellectual collaboration. The choice to work with your friends is good, although it can be dangerous territory.
One senior I talked to, disproving a few of the theories above, told me, “Last semester I was in an upper-level seminar and worked with close friends, and I had to carry them on my back the whole way…I thought it was ridiculous because we’re seniors—I shouldn’t have to do that anymore.” Herein is one of the strongest themes articulated in these conversations: people hate being the disciplinarian, and in group work, someone nearly always has to be.
Here, now, is where I so much want to write some recommendation for the future, introduce a new idea that will lessen the frustration and disorder of group work—something that transforms that which is written above from a series of complaints to a useful proposal in the ever continuing discussion on how to make this college run better, think better, feel better. But here’s the twist: I think it might be our fault. I’m not sure if professors are to blame, even those who are confusingly straddling the line between an individualistic and collaborative curriculum. I think we need to get better at this stuff, I think we’re too ready to finger-point, and we’re even readier to give up.
Generally, professors seem to trust that the world is good, we are good, things are good. They believe in us, in our ability to collaborate, to communicate with each other, to create something that surpasses the ability of the individual. My fear is that we don’t. •
*The name of the class and the subject of the group project has been changed. You know why.
