Monitor Group Activities

Navigating the logistics of group work can be challenging for any student, but returning students often have additional concerns which traditional students may not, such as full-time employment and family demands.  While each student is responsible for understanding and meeting course requirements, at what point does group work outside of class become prohibitive to the returning student’s success?  On the other hand, returning students with more experience and/or resources may essentially take over a group project.  During one semester, students in one group expressed their disbelief to me over the fact that their returning student group member had spent over $100 to put together the materials for their presentation and their final proposal document, of which everyone received a bound, full-color copy.  A member of another group came to my office in tears because her returning student group member had rewritten everything that each of the group members had contributed to the final document.

Rather than simply relying upon the cliché that this is what happens in the “real world,” instructors can take some proactive measures to provide more equitable educational experiences.

• Review in class the challenges of balancing leadership, participation, and task completion in collaborative writing projects, including benefits of and potential problems with on-line communication and electronic exchange and editing of documents (home software incompatibility, viruses, etc.).

• Allocate sufficient computer classroom time for group work.  This alleviates some of the returning student's anxiety over scheduling meetings outside of class; it also gives the group members (and the instructor) an opportunity to observe everyone at work.  Division of labor is facilitated as well, as each group member can work on specific tasks in a hands-on environment, such as graphic design or consistency and format editing, with immediate feedback from other group members.

• Collect regular progress reports which all group members must read and sign or initial; adjust measures accordingly if you require documents to be submitted electronically.

• Hold conferences with groups, whether face-to-face or electronically (preferably synchronous) and require responses from every group member.

• When group projects are complete, require each group member to submit an individual written evaluation of the group itself. Students who may have been hesitant or intimidated in earlier reports or conferences may see this as an outlet for frustrations of which you were not aware.  Electronic submission of this evaluation may afford students an added sense of privacy and thus elicit more honest responses.
 
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