If you’ve ever been a student, you’ve probably done a group project at some point. And chances are you also have a horror story about a group project gone horribly wrong.
That trend became clear when EdSurge recently took a microphone to a campus and asked several students to share horror stories from their group projects. Every student we spoke to had one.
But teaching experts say it doesn’t have to be that way. However, fixing group projects is not easy, as many instructors tend to repeat the same flawed methods that their own teachers used when they were students.
For this week’s EdSurge podcast, we connected with John Warner, a longtime college writing instructor and faculty consultant at Eyler Warner & Associates. He has written books on how to improve writing, including “Why can’t they write?,” as well as an essay on how to arrange group projects. But he says he has trouble getting educators interested in his advice, in part because many see traditional group projects as a way to save time.
In fact, what he suggests may take longer than other types of teaching, Warner says, since it involves more effort on the part of teachers to form groups, teach students about successful group processes, and monitor their progress.
“It’s not about ‘set it and forget it,’” he emphasizes. “Because that’s looking for problems in the backend for the instructor, cleaning up the mess when a student comes in with nothing on a group project day and you have to figure out how you’re going to grade them.”
We reviewed the student group project stories we heard from Warner for his reaction and advice. And we address some important questions about what it means to teach and learn.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Cloudy, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or use the player on this page.
