A big part of the college experience can be summed up with one word: collaboration. This is evidenced largely in the integration of group projects into the fabric of the coursework.
Group projects are meant to help us be better team players and prepare us for work in the professional world. That’s a great sentiment, but a fundamental problem stems from the fact that most college students aren’t interested in true collaboration.
Students have busy schedules. Many have full course loads, jobs, extracurriculars and family responsibilities. Someone with all this on their plate is probably not committed to a fair and equal collaboration where all ideas are heard and discussed in great detail. They just want to survive by doing the least amount of work possible to get the best grade possible. I don’t blame them.
Being in the Educator Preparation Program, I hear a lot about how to use collaborative learning strategies with my future students. Professors have told me it is unwise to throw a group of young students together, give them a task and expect them to pull together a product of worth on their own.
Unfortunately, what is true for elementary schoolers is true for college students. It may seem juvenile to give us assigned roles or meet with us to discuss our progress, but otherwise one or two students can easily end up shouldering much, or all, of the burden. Some professors implement a system for rating group members’ contributions. While this can be helpful, I find myself hesitant to express the issues I encounter during a group project. This gets even worse when there is a lack of any accountability system at all. No one wants to be branded a tattletale.
I’m not saying we should eliminate collaboration from our college experience. There is something to be gained from hearing other people’s perspectives and stories. However, when it comes to asking a group of students to complete a project with little to no accountability or oversight, there is a lot of rethinking to be done.
