Lessons from group assignments in high school
Group assignments at school are painful - let's make working together at work better than that. Photo by Van Tay Media on Unsplash
I was recently speaking with a friend who is a high school teacher. We were discussing the increasing expectation in high schools for students to complete group assignments. In short, teachers are expected to do more group assignments because it helps to prepare students for university (if that is the path that they choose), where increasing amounts of work is done in groups. Why are the universities doing more group work? Employers are providing feedback that graduates need a greater ability to work in teams!
In theory, this is how it is supposed to work - our education system is helping students to develop the capabilities that are relevant for broader society. Except…it isn’t working. Everyone is hating it.
High school students don’t enjoy the process. Either they are able to choose their groups, work with their friends and end up resenting the fact that they are stuck doing more than their fair share of the work (which everyone somehow seems to think is true - despite it being a mathematical impossibility). Some teachers are aware of this and decide to remove this angst by allocating students to groups (either randomly or considering the dynamics of the students). That is problematic as well - students end up working with people that they don’t care about or want to spend time with and teachers spend their days mediating between students who want to change groups.
What is not being done often enough in education settings as well as in our workplaces is an explicit and deliberate approach to team performance.
We are not telling students that working as part of a team is an essential life skill. We are not exploring the benefits of working together as an interdependent group of individuals with a shared purpose and approach. We are not giving them guidance and helping them to differentiate ways of getting work done so that they can design a better outcome. We are not telling them that conflict and struggle is part of the process. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. In the right setting, these are the ways that we make ideas better and achieve more together than we could apart.
Sound familiar? It’s the same thing that happens in many workplaces.
Some questions for you to consider in your teams:
Have you ever learned a specific framework for team performance?
Would a deliberate approach to team performance help you and your teams?