Certainly the topic of the hour:
http://www.nais.org/about/article.cfm?ItemNumber=156788&sn.ItemNumber=4181&tn.ItemNumber=147271
I get the point, and I know Pat Bassett is arguing in favor of a particular position, but I am reminded that correlation is not causation. Also, the Nobel Prize information seems to me to be setting up a straw argument: As someone who’s been in the research world, I know that the increased trend to collaboration has a lot to do with the expense of the tools needed to do most science and medical research these days–it’s not necessarily correlated with the implicit point that’s usually derived from the observation, which is that “team-think” is always better “individual think.”
I also think that reaching out to people for assistance in an informal way produces many of the advantages of “team-work”: in planning my new English section, I have sought and received feedback from many different people, so I’m scarcely working in isolation though there has not been a “team” assembled specifically to help me construct this section of junior English…
Having had a number of pretty negative experiences with teams myself over the years, starting in high school, I am skeptical that teaming is the panacea claimed by its proponents. Way more often than not, I’ve either had to clean up my teammates’ messes or simply do the majority of the work myself while they got a free ride. And being in a dysfunctional team saps your energy and leads to much *less* being accomplished than working alone. It’s clear to me that a “team” has to be more than a group of independent people forced into an association they don’t particularly desire…
However, having said all that, I will add that when teaming works, it works well. My skepticism is based on the fact that I hear no-one talk about all the times that “teamwork” does NOT in fact work well. Nonetheless, I do think being able to work effectively with others is important, so I am looking for ways to make it a positive learning experience for my students. The group tests for the math kids were one example this year where it worked well.
Looking at what works and what doesn’t, both based on my own experience and listening to other teachers as well as students, suggests to me that (as several people at the Summer Spark session this summer commented) simply getting a group of people to do what’s in practice an individual assignment is not worth a great deal. I’m thinking of some of the “presentations” I’ve seen and watched being prepared by students for various classes, for instance.
It is also clear to me that kids need training on how to work well as a team if one is really going to expect good results out of the teaming and if the kids are not allowed simply to form their own groupings.
Apart from practice in how to work together effectively with people you may not either like or respect, what’s needed are assignments geared specifically toward being done and evaluated as a group. Depending on the nature of the assignment and the attitude of the kids in the groups, I think you need ways to assess the overall success of the assignment as well as to provide some accountability for the individuals in it. The “have the kids rate each other’s contributions” approach suggested from business models has a number of pitfalls in the hothouse environment of high school. In a group of 2 or 3 people, a number of kids simply won’t report poorly on their groupmates because it will be obvious whose comments resulted in their lower-than-expected grade, and a lot of animosity or social fallout can come into play.
What’s true of all assignments, in my opinion–that they work best when the kids are genuinely interested in and challenged by them–is even truer of group assignments.
Anyway, I think one of the things I will try this year is to find some group assignments/assessments that work effectively. I suspect it will be a non-trivial task.