Working in Groups (Part 1) - An Introduction to Group Work

Welcome to this set of resources made by the Centre for Academic Success to help guide you through the process of group work. You should listen to each video in order to get the best from the resources. There are many different types of group work that can take place in a variety of contexts, and you'll almost certainly be required to do some kind of group work.

During your time at Swansea University, you may need to work in a group in a classroom setting. You may need to complete tasks and projects with others, and you might find that the work you produce as part of a group forms part of an assessment for your course. Although it can sometimes seem like a challenge, the skills you gain from successfully working in a group are useful in all areas of your life.

And will have a positive impact on your employability when you graduate before you move on to the other segments on this web page, it will be useful for you to begin reflecting on why you don't like group work or indeed why you do like it. Perhaps you're an introvert who finds team work exhausting, or perhaps you're really sociable and you like to work with others.

Maybe you don't like not having full control over your own work. Spend a couple of minutes jotting down as many ideas as you can about why you do or don't like working in groups once you've jotted some thoughts down, try to think about the advantages and disadvantages of working in a group even if you haven't done any group work before, you probably still have an idea of what could be difficult or what may might make life easier about being in a group. So spend a few minutes listing what you think are the advantages and disadvantages of working in groups research shows that students generally have low expectations of group work and as a result often do not collaborate well or even at all in fact, group hate is a well-established notion in learning theory, and on the screen is a list of the most common reasons given by students for disliking group work.

Our first task is to begin thinking about whether we can flip some of these ideas on their head. For example, if you identify with the first point on the screen, why should my grade depend on what other people do? Are you able to stop thinking about this in terms of collaborating, sharing skills and knowledge and sharing responsibility? If you don't like the people in your group, are you able to think about this as an opportunity for enhancing your communication skills instead?

Spend some time thinking about each of these reasons to consider whether they apply to you and the way you feel about group work.

What we do know about group work is that simply trying to approach negative feelings in a different way isn't going to be enough. So it might help you to know that despite this notion of group hate, collaborating as part of a group can still provide better learning than working individually. There is, in fact, strong evidence indicating that students working in groups outperform their counterparts in a number of key areas.

Research shows that we learn more when we work cooperatively and collaboratively and that, in fact, while the need to produce a piece of work drives us, the process of group work is what makes the learning happen. In basic terms, the best learning happens when we see ourselves not only as an individual within a group, but when we feel like the group itself has become part of our learning identity.

As these two researchers state, when working in groups, students outperform counterparts in a number of key areas. A large part of the reason for this is because working cooperatively and collaboratively, both aid active learning. Active learning is the opposite of you sitting and listening to your teachers. Active learning is when you build the knowledge and skills you need through doing and being at the centre of your own learning experience.

All of this means that you are developing your ability to think critically. When you work with others. You are constantly testing ideas, judging other perspectives, on the material or the task, making connections between ideas, reaching conclusions that you might need to change based on how you appraise what others think and learning to argue your position. The visual on screen is a learning and teaching framework called Bloom's Taxonomy.

If you look at the tabs next to the pyramid, you can see that the skills I've just described fall at the top of the pyramid under Analyze and Evaluate. So justifying a stand or decision drawing connections among ideas. These are called higher order skills. And if you can demonstrate these, you will receive better marks than you would by simply showing an understanding of the concepts in your task.

If you're interested in learning more about this, you can check out the critical thinking course run by the Centre for Academic Success. However, in basic terms, group work will help you achieve these higher order skills. In addition to needing those critical thinking skills for your degree. You can also see from this slide that employers highly value the competencies and capabilities you gain from working in a group.

Each of the skills listed on this slide is directly related to teamwork, and being able to demonstrate experience of these skills will help your employability. So then, bearing all that in mind, the rest of the segments on this web page will focus on building a successful group. In the videos that follow, I'll talk you through the most commonly used framework for mapping the development of a group which is itself based on the research of psychologist Bruce Tuckman.

This framework consists of four distinct stages: forming, storming, norming, and performing. And Tuckman added a final stage adjourning a few years after first developing this model. You may also see adjourning referred to as mourning. Being aware of this framework will help you identify the dynamics at play within your group and will give you insight into the opportunities available and the problems that might need solving each of the video segments that follows will describe the characteristics of these stages of group formation and will suggest some tactics for moving forward with your group work.