Reply to HS teachers that give group projects

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I refuse to give group projects. It means I have to grade 4x as many submissions, but I don't feel right allowing any student to get marks for another student's ability/knowledge.

Any assessment is individual, completed in class only so that mom/dad can't do it and Johnny can't have Jimmy do his work.[/quote]

In English, collaborative work is in the SOL framework. It’s a standard they’re supposed to cover. We do all the group work in class because they’re not large projects and this way we know the parents didn’t do and the kids have to have accountability for how they participated and showed up in their group. [b]But it’s an important skill for them to learn[/b]. [/quote]

It’s not. It’s really not. I know someone somewhere in the school admin org chart thinks this, but it’s not true.  Kids need to learn how to produce good work on their own. Group projects teaches slackers how to slack.  That’s all that comes out of it, and that isn’t good for anyone. It’s not good for the slacker, and it’s not good for the kid who has to pick up their slack.  It doesn’t teach them how to function in the real world.  It teaches them behaviors that will get them fired.

It does reduce the amount of grading that teachers have to do, and I get that our teachers are over worked, but forcing kids to do group projects is not the solution to that problem. [/quote]

We do both. Obviously the kids are expected to produce most of their work on their own. However, the function of a group project is that children actually do build understanding and create connections when they share ideas with one another. They’re taught and instructed to build upon, test, and refine each other's ideas. Anyone who has ever raised kids or seen them interact in any environment understands that they actually learn best when they work on a skill together and share their learning. For me, it doesn’t reduce my grading AT ALL, not one single bit, to have the kids work collaboratively on something. I still have to assess each of them individually three separate times - in the planning, creation, and presentation spheres - and provide feedback, and guidance, and assistance to each group as they go. You don’t like group work so you want to believe we do it out of laziness or that it isn’t valuable in distinct ways but that’s simply not true. [/quote]

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