For this blog, I’m defining a group as a minimum of three students working together. I know you can have a group of two, but teachers call this a pair and tend to think of a group as larger than two; I’ll go with that distinction.
The problem with group work in a classroom is that it often allows people to get out of working hard. In my experience, as soon as you have three or four or more people working together on something, someone, or perhaps more than one person, will take a lead, and they will end up doing the lion’s share of the work; the group’s aims may well be achieved but not with the same level of effort from everyone in it.
It’s not inevitable that some people will do less work in a group task, but it is common. At the risk of generalising, in most classes there are: students who work really hard, regardless of the subject and topic they are doing; students who work hard when they are motivated by the particular subject or topic, but less hard when they are not; students who will do just enough to complete the task, and may chat a bit and take it easy, too: and students who will do very little work, if they can get away with it, for a host of reasons. My point here is that it’s that bit easier to do less work, if that’s your inclination, in a groupwork situation; and if students are given a lot of groupwork to do, over time, it means that some students can avoid a lot of work. We absolutely do not want that in school.
In some subjects, of course, like GCSE PE, Drama and Music, group work is built into the DNA of the subject. For example, in PE, team sports depend on students working together. In Science, too, people will often work together in groups to conduct experiments. What I’m talking about here is not those situations where group work should or must be done, but typical classroom work where the teacher has free rein over the activities the students will do. In typical classroom work, I think we maximise our students’ effort through a mixture of whole-class work (teacher explanations and modelling, no hands-up question and answer work etc…), pair work and individual work. It’s harder for a work-shy student to hide if they are part of a pair or working on their own than if they are part of a group of four! I also think that all students are more likely to think if their default mode of learning is whole-class work, pair work and individual work. Thinking is crucial: for each one of us, learning tends to happen when we think hard and grapple with things.
Done well, group work has its part to play in school – for example, in giving young people opportunities to work cooperatively with others – and people like Dylan Wiliam have written extensively about ways of organising group work that can mitigate the issues I have described. But doing group work really well is very hard work for the teacher, without, often, a significant dividend for all students’ learning. The bottom line here is that I am not anti group work; I am anti people getting out of typically working hard. HBK Core Value number 1: Hard Work.
Mark Patterson
