Group projects offer significant learning benefits:  They can stimulate critical thinking, expose students to an expanded array of perspectives on problems, and provide opportunities for students to work on projects too large for them to tackle individually.  Through group projects students develop collaboration skills, both learning from and contributing to the expertise and insights of others.

Key factors in planning group projects effectively include helping students develop and maintain a sense of being a team, designing a project that requires students to collaborate, designing ways to keep students individually accountable within the group, and developing policies for troubleshooting in cases where group conflicts arise.

• Communicate to students the importance of the team work in achieving course learning goals. 
• Take time for team-building activities and discussion of what makes learning teams effective.
• Consider asking members to choose roles, such as facilitator, note-taker, or planner.
• Set aside time in class for group work; consider participating in groups yourself to help model and encourage collaboration.
• Give members the opportunity to reflect on the quality of their contributions to the team -- for example, through a short reflective writing assignment.

• Consider the formation of student groups: How can students best be grouped to maximize student learning?
• Design the group project around a problem that is open-ended and requires some evaluation and decision-making.  Make it complex enough so that students need each other’s expertise to complete it.
• Design ways to periodically track group members’ awareness of the project as a whole, esuch as writing assignments that ask each member to describe progress or informal reporting out by one or more group members. 
• Each group member should be responsible for at least one facet of the final project.  However, design the final project so that students must integrate their work rather than piece together individual contributions. 
• Include as part of grading criteria the degree to which project components are well-integrated.

• Consider asking students to develop a group “charter” at the beginning of the quarter which outlines member responsibilities and group norms.
• Devise a system for students to be accountable to one another.  Possibilities include asking students to submit ratings of each other’s participation or having students periodically rate their own contributions.
• Give students individual feedback on the quality of their contributions to the group.
• Consider whether some portion of the project grade should be based on individual contributions. 

• Divide projects into segments and develop a timeline for completing each segment.  Monitor group progress throughout the project.
• Regularly collect student feedback on how effectively groups are working, and work with students to address issues that arise.
• Review with students your earlier discussions of how to learn effectively in groups.

At CIDR we can help you plan, implement, and assess the use of group projects in your classes.  Call or e-mail to arrange an appointment with a CIDR consultant.

For examples of group project guidelines, team development activities, group charters, and other group project resources, see CIDR's collection of resources on Using Small Groups and Student Teams.