The Problem With Group Work
Written on August 3, 2008
I got a real laugh out of this post from Scenes From The Battleground. Go over and read it - see if it doesn’t make you grin. Here are some highlights:
“If you want to learn how to cooperate effectively with others, then the last place you’d start is in a group of teenagers being made to do school work. This is like saying the best way to learn how to make pork sausages is by being imprisoned in a pig farm with a half-dozen rabbis.”
“Teenagers are naturally hierarchical. It will be assumed that the dominant child should do everything if the activity looks enjoyable, or nothing if it looks like hard work.”
“The suggestion that they might learn in groups or pairs is entirely based on the idea that discussion between children is inherently educational. Now, it is impossible to deny that discussing how to answer a question with somebody is often helpful. The strange idea here is that discussing it with somebody who knows roughly as little as you do, is going to be more educational than discussing it with the graduate who has been explaining for years, and is employed to explain it to you.”
Filed in: ELA.
Cheers.
[…] Catching Sparrows goes on a screed about the problem with group work. The only thing is, even though I call it a screed, I agree. […]
I LOVE IT!!!!
LOVE IT, LOVE IT, LOVE IT!
Really, the entire edu-world, the air-fairy theory part, has nothing whatsoever to do with the real world in which the rest of us live.
I read yet another Dire Warning about the crying need for 21st century skills such as, e.g., collaboration the other day…..it makes me want to accumulate a file of factoids about, say, “how many times per minute an adolescent male thinks of sex” and start emailing them out systematically every time someone pops off with this stuff.
C’s Global Studies - Honors - teacher told the class he will be giving multiple choice tests.
Apparently, there is a God.
Except I guess he’s mostly hanging out with the Jesuits these days.