Groupwork: Teamwork's Evil Twin

A travesty whose harms extend beyond the school gates

Teamwork - collaborating with others towards a shared goal - is pretty much a universal feature of the working world. The working world for adults, that is; school is a far more individualistic endeavour that proceeds from doing your work, to sitting your exams to getting your results. Granted, the list of ‘things which should be taught at school’ is longer than the school day, but if we’re prioritising properly, surely teamwork should make the cut?

Doubtless that thought combined with the difficulties of changing a complex system like school is what led to the spread of groupwork, which purports to nurture the vital skill of collaboration within the existing constraints of the classroom. This is a grave mistake though, because group work is teamwork’s evil twin, a dark perversion of the art of cooperation and it would be better if every second in the classroom was spent in monkish silence than in this twisted practice.

Groupwork, where typically three or four students are instructed to work together to produce a piece of writing or a presentation, suffers from two fatal flaws. The first is that although it will be stipulated that all the group must participate, in practice there will be no enforcement of this. Consequences, if they ensue at all, will only kick in if no work is produced at all, not if work is produced but the rest of the group were free-riders on the effort of the most conscientious - indeed that is the standard result of group work. As you’re reading this blog there’s a better than even chance you were one of those geeky pillars propping up this rotting edifice but remember you’re in the minority here, most children respond to a group task by thinking “someone will have to do this work, but it doesn’t have to be me”.

The second great flaw is that the group in question has no identity; no one has a stake in its success or failure beyond possible consequences for them as individuals. This is the key difference from teamwork where the success of the team is the ultimate goal towards which the effort of each individual is pooled. Groupwork purports to nurture the vital skill of working with others, while swapping out “come together for a common cause” with “try or don’t try according to a calculation of your self interest”. We’re not throwing the baby out with the bath water here, we’re holding it under until it drowns.

You might think describing the mundane practice of how children are sometimes given homework in these terms hyperbolic, but that underrates the importance of education. At school we learn a lot of knowledge, some of which we forget immediately some more slowly as the years roll on, but alongside this explicit instruction is a deeper, unconscious process of learning how the world of work works. We learn the difference between professional and casual behaviour, how tasks go from conception through execution to review and when it comes to working with our peers we learn that shared tasks are either a chore to be avoided or a vehicle for self promotion.

The generation raised with groupwork, roughly those who were at school this century, enter the workplace viewing the idea that they should do anything that’s not explicitly their job with suspicion and that they should do part of someone else’s job with horror. They experience a manager’s attempts to make them do these things not as the inevitable back and forth of being an individual serving an organisation whose goals supersede their own interests, but as vindictiveness. The idea that they be singled out and made to do a task that could be done by anyone is so alien that it can only have come from malice. Businesses, charities and public sector bodies invest millions in correcting these attitudes in us as adults, but it’s a mostly futile struggle because the first principles we lay down on any subject are so hard to dislodge.

Groupwork is an object lesson in the folly of taking a system that works, in this case students being taught academic subjects, and tacking on to it a noble goal, teamwork, without thinking through whether the change actually serves the intended purpose. Teamwork is important enough to consider more radical changes to the school curriculum to embed it properly, but groupwork actively harms our ability to work together and should be put in the bin.