A friend of mine started her classes today and had a few interesting things to say about the nature of college class structure and who attends college. Her first comments (which if they weren’t behind a subscriber wall I would link to) focused on her dislike of group/collaborative style of teaching. This places me in an odd position of sorts as my sister, a newly minted professor at the University of Arkansas in Ft. Smith, typically uses group work as a means of getting more out of her students. Not every assignment involves group work, but a large portion does. Lindsy, my dear sister, has found such collaborative efforts fruitful in what individual students are able to take away from her courses. Then again, being a professor of English and teaching composition courses, Lindsy wants the students to understand writing as a process versus just a product. The idea is to get the students into the habits of revising and reworking their papers before the final due date. Noble in intent and somewhat successful in practice. So Lindsy keeps using that style.
Conversely, my friend sees such collaborative/group work as a waste of time and means of getting lesser students to pass the course rather than let reality play as much teacher as the professor. Difference is in the classes as my friend was in a psychology class versus an English class. Oh, and the professor is a bit New Age which grates her, and me, to no end. I’m already a skeptic of the reach of psychology in providing truths about human nature. Not that I believe psychology cannot answer some fundamental questions about the mind, I simply find most of those supposed answers are built on shaky foundations. It’s all so woolly-boolly and not in that complex way of Continental philosophy. But I’m getting off point here.
The question is whether collaborative work in a college classroom can and do, on average, lead to a better grasp of the material? As Lindsy has shown, collaborative work can enhance a student’s understanding, but that comes from a rather specific kind of class. Typically I’ve found that weighty topics require a mixture of both collaborative efforts and individual thinking. There is an important caveat though–said collaborative efforts are usually between the professor and the student. The student isn’t supposed to know the answer to complex questions immediately and I sincerely don’t think just tossing such a question to a group of students to work out is the best way of arriving at a good answer. I do think collaborative work has its place in the writing process, but that’s for the same reason Lindsy relies on the practice in her classes–the effective expression of an idea. Even for those who already know how to write well tackling complex problems poses additional problems in how to effectively convey a response to the initial question. Still, either way, the goal is the advancement of the individual student, not a group of students. If the majority of students come walking out of the class at the end of the semester lack their own understanding of what the class intended to teach, then it’s not necessarily a failure on the student’s part.
A well-run classroom will give individual students the ability to think about and use the material taught in future classes and even in the everyday world. As banal as that sounds it’s worthwhile to remind people of the purpose behind college classes. College isn’t high school and despite the efforts of many professors I believe making a student feel good about their self is exactly the wrong way of going about things. Students need the kick in the head. They need to know they’re no longer in high school. College should be hard. If you haven’t felt like you’ve gone twelve with Jesus then the professor hasn’t worked you enough. The brain works in much the same way a muscle does and you don’t build muscle without pushing past what you could normally do. The pitfall of collaborative work is the tendency of some students to let others do the major lifting while reaping the benefits. Now Lindsy has designed her collaborative groups to reflect the output of all the students and not just those who bothered to actually, you know, work. So dead weight actually acts as dead weight thus earning such students not only a bad grade but the anger of their fellow students as well. An A student won’t put up with a C/D student acting like a C/D student.
My friend’s dislike of the collaborative classroom isn’t misplaced, but neither is it completely fair. Where collaborative efforts work are in the writing process, but the individual thinking process is just that–the work of an individual mind. Without some balance students fail to learn personal responsibility while simultaneously failing to learn anything from the class. Professors must engage their students personally as much as they do through other students. That can’t happen without some rapport with the students. That also can’t happen without the students engaging themselves in the class. Thus the way a professor handles the grading of collaborative efforts is just as important as the grading of individual efforts. Such grading cannot fall into the trap of making the students feel good about themselves either. If a student isn’t producing the quality of work expected at the college level then they have earned their failing grade as much as the A student has earned theirs. Sometimes a student has to fail to learn anything.