Photo taken by Tarik Haiga on Unsplash.
In her article “Writing ‘Eyeball To Eyeball’: Having a Successful Collaboration,” Rebecca Ingalls gives very useful advice on how to have a productive and enjoyable group project experience. However, I’d like to call into question the applicability of her advice. It requires two conditions to actually be effective: cooperative group members and sufficient time.
The discrepancy in timeframes caught my attention rather quickly. Ingalls states to “lay out work for the next few weeks.” But what if students don’t have that time? Last semester, I experienced my first ever teacher-assigned group project; I had to prepare a twenty minute presentation with four other classmates in the span of roughly two weeks. As you could imagine, it was a mess.
To add to the stress of having too little time, finding a time and day where all members could meet was difficult. It wasn’t just the fact we were all college students with varying schedules due to classes, but also that my group mates were slow to respond to texts, or just didn’t answer. In the end, we found that we could only meet two days out of the week for an hour each, which gave us three to four meetings—or roughly four hours—to plan and get everyone on the same page, since texting was an unreliable form of communication and our professor didn’t use class sessions to give the groups time to prepare, unlike Ingalls does in her class.
In-person meetings weren’t much better, though. While I do acknowledge that effort was certainly put in by each member, it felt hasty. I felt many of the members were more focused on getting it over with and leaving, and it wasn’t uncommon for our one-hour meetings to be cut short to half an hour.
One of the members of the group would always say something along the lines of “sure, I don’t mind whatever topic you guys choose. I’ll do anything.” Many of the others would mostly nod their heads along to what I said when I would specifically ask for their input and opinion on the topic. No one stopped to consider what topic would have been fun to do for everyone and if it was doable with the time constraint we had. It was frustrating.
In group projects like the one I had last semester, I think Ingalls advice is useless. The whole reason it’s so effective and fun, especially in her class, is because of the way she sets it up. She gives her students the leg room to be thorough and—I’m assuming—they’re more cooperative and passionate, which is why her students had such great experiences doing the group project she assigned. Outside of the education system, I’ve had a handful of fun and productive group projects myself. But they were like that because my group mates and I had more than enough time to collaborate and were equally invested in the project. It’s during these kind of group projects I’d apply Ingalls’ advice.
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