Laying the foundations for groupwork
Antigone Kyrousi
What is the idea?
This short chapter discusses a group activity, designed to promote team cohesiveness and open-mindedness, in the context of a Business Research Methods undergraduate course. Students had to work in groups (of 3 or 4) for the duration of the course to produce a research report addressing an identified business problem, but many groups faced challenges due to the absence of a shared vision and teamwork skills. Similar problems were encountered in another course on Integrated Marketing Communications, where students worked on a lengthy group project. To address these issues, a formative hourly activity was implemented early on in the term. This activity works best with classes of 15-20 students and it can be implemented in most courses adopting a team-based active learning approach.
Why this idea?
Team-based active learning is based on the cooperative learning pedagogy and produces numerous benefits for individual learners (Espey 2018). Permanent student groups (ie. groups that are formed for the duration of the course), unlike temporary ones require students to tackle interpersonal difficulties and to appreciate the benefits of groupwork (Michaelsen 1992). Team processing skills, one of the elements of cooperative learning, are conducive to building a learning orientation, yet for students undertaking lengthy group assignments, team cohesiveness needs to be built from the onset (Laverie et al., 2008).
The activity, was implemented in 5 different small cohorts within two different undergraduate courses, in both of which students had to undertake a demanding group project. The activity was inspired by the need to address practical challenges encountered in class and by other activities discussed in Dawson (2016) and Parker and Goldrick-Jones (2011).
In the first part of this activity (role-play), students work individually drawing freely on their own experiences and understanding of teamwork; they receive a hypothetical scenario in which each student is assigned the role of a ‘mentor’ for a group of younger students who are supposedly embarking on a group project. Their task is to generate five tips/ pieces of advice they would give to these younger students to guide them in collaborating fairly and ethically. In most of the runs of this part of the activity, it was observed that students tended to generate tips mostly drawing on their (negative) past experiences (e.g. ‘think carefully before choosing who to work with’, ‘be prepared to fight with friends’).
In the second part, students work in their assigned groups. They are presented with a list of statements/ rules of groupwork (a list of statements generated by the instructor or derived from literature). Statements refer to a climate of respect, open-mindedness, resolution of conflicts (indicatively: ‘All members will respect [other] team members’ ideas and promote a positive working attitude’, ‘If a disagreement should arise,