Supporting Students

• Let your students know how you will be overseeing the assignment and clarify the extent to which you will provide support as they research and work together.
• Establish guidelines as to how and when they should contact you with questions and if problems arise. 

Break the group project into smaller components and assess and provide students with feedback on each piece. Distributing these over the course of the semester ensures that students won’t procrastinate until just before the due date and alerts you to groups going in the wrong direction early enough to provide them with corrective feedback. Finally, this helps you by distributing your project grading throughout the term.

How to do it:

• Identify logical steps in the assignment. To do this, ask yourself how a professional in your field might approach a project like this. For instance, if your students are asked to create a website, a professional may begin website creation with a needs assessment. If so, have your students start there and make this the first part of their assignment. Inform students that the process you have chosen for them is similar to what professionals would use for this type of project. Make sure to communicate these steps explicitly to your students.
• Take into account your own time for providing feedback and grading. Give yourself enough time between steps to provide feedback and return it to students before the next step. This is especially important if a subsequent task depends on the work done in the present one.

Many students lack the skills needed for successful teamwork and, as a result, have negative experiences when working on a group project. Providing support in this area will result in better functioning groups and a better final group product. Below are some tasks that can help your students work together more effectively.

• Assign roles or have students do this within their groups. Having clear roles allows students to distribute group leadership among members. There are a variety of roles your students could take on, depending on your project, including facilitator, organizer, reporter, and skeptic. Having group members rotate in the roles allows them to experience different kinds of leadership.
• Create a group process document or contract. Students assigned to a group project often want to dive in immediately and begin working on the assignment. It is worth spending some time, however, on talking about how the group will work together. Some instructors ask groups to complete a group process document that represents the group consensus on matters related to the project: being prepared for meetings, doing work in a timely manner, and making decisions. It is desirable to have student groups work on this early in the term, before they run into conflict. If they do run into conflict, they can refer back to this document.
• Anticipate stages in group development. Research by Tuckman (2010) and others recognize that groups develop through five predictable stages: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. This brief video describes these stages. The Effective U Group Work site has information about these stages for students.
• Assess group function. The group should periodically spend a few moments assessing how they are working together. Surveys or inventories are a good way to gather students’ opinion on group functioning. It could be as simple as: What is one thing our group is doing well? What is one thing our group could improve? If your class meets in-person or synchronously, schedule class time for students to do this.  Allotting class time shows that you value this aspect of the group process.
• Manage group conflicts. Following all of the steps above will help student groups prevent unproductive conflict. However, conflict can still arise and when it does, inform students how you would like them to handle it. For instance, would you be willing to meet with a dysfunctional group to help them sort out their problems? Will you allow groups to “fire” a group member under certain conditions, for example, if the student does not attend meetings or respond to communications? You can help students understand their default approaches to handling conflicts by having them take this short quiz.  Understanding their own approaches can make the conflict resolution process easier.

How to do it:

• Provide a brief presentation to your students about the teamwork skills they will need to complete their assigned project.  Alternatively you could create a handout  or assign reading.
• Make discussing group process an assignment. For instance, you can require students to complete a group process statement and turn it in for points.
• Have students reflect on their group and individual development. 
• Share your own experiences working as part of a group. Tell them about a time your group encountered difficulty and how you handled it. 

Resources

• Group Guidelines Agreement
• Effective U: Group Projects

Approaches to group projects may vary by cultural background. Students from some cultures may find it important to establish relationships prior to beginning a project and may not be accustomed to dealing with disagreement directly.  Students from others may take the opposite approach and want to take a “business first” approach.     

Differences in language ability may also affect how the group functions.  It's not uncommon for nonnative speakers of English to feel hesitant about expressing their ideas because of a lack of confidence in their speaking or writing abilities.  The use of idioms and slang can also impede communication.  

How to do it:

• Encourage students to share their typical approach to a group project.  This can benefit all students and will allow students to better work together.
• Encourage the use of different forms of communication. Suggest that students keep important information in a document available to everyone to avoid miscommunication. 
• State explicitly that you value diversity. You could include a syllabus statement to this effect. Make sure that students know how to pronounce each other’s names and encourage them to work through language and culture barriers that may arise.  (Spencer-Oatey, 2016)

The Minnesota English Language Program (MELP) has additional resources on supporting multilingual students.

Resources

• Groupwork for nonnative speakers of English
• Culture and group work

A major concern of students regarding group projects is the difficulty of getting the entire group together outside of class to work on the project. Between classes, work, and other obligations, many students have very busy schedules. To address this, regularly set aside some time for students to be able to work with their groups in class. This also allows students to ask you questions that come up while they are working on the assignment.

How to do it:

In-person classes

• Assign an in-class task to finish. To keep groups productive during class, assign them a task to finish and turn in at the end of their in-class work time. This helps students focus and provides you with feedback on how they are doing. Make sure the task directly relates to some aspect of the project.
• Monitor groups. When providing in-class time to work on the project, observe group dynamics so that you can provide guidance as needed.

Online Classes

• Have student groups meet in breakout rooms with an assigned task to complete related to their group project. Drop in the rooms to check for questions or confusion. For a large class with many groups, you can have groups work on their task using Google slides or documents so that you can monitor the progress of each group from the main room and visit individual breakout rooms as needed

Resource: Manage Zoom Breakout Rooms

Communication is key to a successful outcome, but often provides a challenge for students. If your course is fully online, working in groups can be even more challenging for students. Providing students with effective web communication applications will help them get started more quickly. Some possibilities include dedicated group discussion boards on Canvas, Google documents, or Slack. 

How to do it:

• Provide instructions for how to use the tools. Most tools listed here have short video tutorials that outline how the site functions and provide a link to more information. Include these with your suggested tools in your communication toolkit. 
• Ask students to determine their preferred communication tool as part of their group process agreement.