by Nathan Nikolic
Note: This piece is part one of a two-part article; part one, which discusses course design and syllabus structure, was published in our Fall 2024 Issue.
Purposeful Group Work
As a college student, I generally hated group projects because it usually meant one or two students (I was always one of them) would do everything while the rest slacked off. And if that was the case, why have group assignments at all? Determined to avoid this problem, I thought long and hard about how to design the report assignment, and I talked to other instructors about their approaches to group work. After a lot of thinking and discussion, I decided on two crucial elements to prioritize when it came to group work: 1) each student must be individually responsible for producing a specified amount of writing, and 2) the task assigned to the group must be genuinely large and complex enough that working together wasn’t merely a pedagogical contrivance but a necessity of the project itself. To address the first issue, I made each group complete a work distribution plan early on in the semester.
This served both as an outline to their report and as a kind of contract between group members that determines who’s writing what. They were free to change this plan, as long as they had each other’s consent, throughout the semester, but each student had to write a total of four thousand words for the sections they took on. Because I knew what each student was responsible for writing, I could give them individual and group grades. On the second point, the report assignment requires a massive amount of research, much more than most of my students have ever done. It cannot be completed by one person. Additionally, the task of forming a cohesive narrative throughout the report must be tackled collectively through continuous discussion and editing. I also decided that I would give the groups as much freedom and responsibility for their own research and writing as possible.1 Students got to choose who to work with and what to work on. They had to help each other find information in databases, newspapers, encyclopedias, etc. I’d like to express my deep gratitude to the wonderful Baruch librarian, Peggy Teich, who held library resource workshops and designed a research guide for my class.
In their end-of-semester reflection letters, many students comment on the invaluable experience of working with their classmates on an extended project. From communication skills, to writing skills, to just having an enjoyable classroom experience, most gave glowing assessments of the course. Here’s what one student from my Fall 2022 section said about the group work process:
“I feel like this was my favorite part because it helped me communicate with other people in the class and I actually laughed and got to be more comfortable around other people in the class. This was also my favorite part because as a class we got to talk and meet other people compared to other classes where it’s silent and no one knows each other. Also, because we got to meet each other it helped us all feel comfortable when we eventually presented our final project in front of the class.”
A student in my Fall 2023 section said the following about their group:
“I was really lucky to have a group that was extremely friendly and reliable. I not only was able to hand in a project I was proud of with them, but I also got to become friends with them. I think we all worked well together, and I do not know what I would have changed about the way we worked on this project.”
As a teacher, reading such reflections warms my heart. We all hope that our students will make social as well as academic connections in our classes. You may be thinking, anyone can pick out a few positive comments to feel good about. That’s true. But even when students encountered frustrating challenges, they tended to reflect on them as opportunities for learning and growth. Their level of awareness was, in some cases, stunning. Here’s what another student from my Fall 2022 class had to say about navigating challenges around time management and respect for each other as writers:
“The concept of group work has become much clearer to me as to succeed with a group requires communication, and individual responsibility. Without communication or responsibility the group will be in a state of total disaster and completing any activity would be impossible. Working as a team also showed me the importance of creating a motivating group dynamic. For example at times like during the midterms, our group slowed down work for our research paper and we had come to realize that some of our feedback had been rushed which wasn’t fair for all of us as writers. This dynamic in our group did eventually change as we have taken earlier steps to completing assignments and allowed ourselves to put forth the best possible research paper.”
This student reflects on a problem many students have, balancing the workload of multiple classes. They then observe that rushed peer review feedback wasn’t fair to each other–it wasn’t respectful of the time and effort each of them had put into their writing. And because of that, they decided to prioritize completing their assignments earlier. Many students emphasized the value that they came to place on their own and their group mates’ ideas. It was incredible to see how seriously they took themselves as researchers and writers, the high standards to which they held themselves.
Through my approach to group work, I aim to foster a community of writers that avoids the danger Joseph Harris described, that “community can soon become an empty and sentimental word.2 The community that students form within their groups and within the larger class is one that continuously interrogates, constructs, and reconfigures all aspects of the discourse in which they participate, from norms about individual and group labor to political problems of economic justice and ethics. We become a community of writers through interrogating assumptions about author, audience, and purpose, and process collectively.
Next Steps
I would love to see some version of this class become standard at Baruch. I don’t think the topic is so important, though the corporate world does appeal to students here. But the form, a group research class, has a lot of potential and value. I wonder if there could be a designated number of
sections of 2150 that take this model, a single large collaborative research assignment over the course of the semester. I’ve already had one other adjunct come to me interested in adapting my syllabus for their own 2150 course this spring. Perhaps we could discuss the merits of this idea during a curriculum review session.
In the meantime, I will continue teaching this course whenever I get a chance, tweaking and adjusting the structure based on student suggestions and my own observations. One of the main challenges is balancing group work time in class, which students tend to become excited about very quickly, and maintaining a larger class dynamic. I may experiment next time with having groups swap drafts of their reports for peer review and comments. That way, there’s a reason for students to talk to people outside of their groups. Overall, though, this is hands down the best writing course I’ve taught at Baruch, both in terms of how much the students enjoy it, in terms of creating class community, and in terms of how much I see them develop as researchers, thinkers, and writers.
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To contact Dr. Nikolic about course design, assignment structure, and other related questions, you can reach him here.
- This, of course, comes with its own set of challenges, as Carole Jane Elliotta and Michael Reynolds note in “Participative pedagogies, group work and the international classroom: an account of students’ and tutors’ experiences” (2014). They write: “A fundamental aspect of group work is group membership and the degree of discretion which students have over choosing who they work with. These choices over membership and selection are some of the ways in which the distribution of power and control within the programme are reflected” (312). ↩︎
- Joseph Harris, “The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing,” College Composition and Communication 40, no. 1 (1989): 11–22, 13, https://doi.org/10.2307/358177. ↩︎