📚🎓 I love group projects. My students tend to say THEY love group projects. Providing awesome opportunities for students to develop critical 21st-century skills like communication, collaboration, and shared responsibility is crucial. But we all know that group work also often opens the door for inequitable workloads, team member conflicts, and arguments about “subjective grading.” 🤔
Obviously, we need to build a good classroom culture, build relationships with our students, & pay attention to them & what’s going on during our class in order to properly manage group work and group projects. 🏫👥 These are skills we build over time as teachers. But there’s another element of the group work thing that can also help. 💼
You need rubrics that equitably assess every aspect of the group project process – from the final presentation to individual contributions and team dynamics behind the scenes. Rubrics help us focus the kids on what matters, and they also give us a way to show them that we are being objective about how we grade their group work. 📊👩🏫
I use three different rubrics to evaluate group work, tweaking them depending on the type of project, activity, or presentation we’re doing. (Get them here!) 📝✨
The Group Presentation Rubric evaluates not just content knowledge, but also crucial competencies like confident public speaking, effective use of visuals, time management, and appropriate research citation. (This is my “main” rubric, and I can tweak it to fit different types of projects as needed.) 🎤🖼️
The Student Self/Peer Evaluation holds each team member accountable by having them score how well (and how equally) they upheld their responsibilities and how collaborative and responsible their peers were. This instills personal buy-in and self-awareness from day one, and it ensures that the kids have a chance to tell me how things really went if they weren’t comfortable doing that in person** 🤝👥
The Teacher Teamwork Rubric allows you to give groups YOUR feedback about what you observed about their group work. Throughout the project or activity, I make notes on their group teamwork rubric related to what I’m seeing in their group interactions over time. Did they bounce ideas off each other? Re-divide work when someone fell behind? Resolve conflicts constructively? These are the skills that separate productive teams from dysfunctional ones, and I like them to be able to get some feedback on these soft skills as well as the academic skills. 🗒️👀
**Definitely, definitely, definitely encourage your students to come speak to you if their group is having a problem or if they are having a problem with a team member! This is SO important for collaborative learning. I always do mini-lessons on how to work through conflicts with team members and how to work together productively, planning, executing, and troubleshooting the project as a team. However, I always emphasize that if they already tried dealing with a problem themselves and that didn’t work, they should ABSOLUTELY come talk to me, and we’ll figure out a positive solution together (and I won’t think they are being a baby!). 🧑🏫🤝
**Also, I often award extra credit if everyone (or most people) in their group indicated on their self/peer eval that a certain team member really went above & beyond. This is a nice way to reward their positive contribution to their team & exceptional work ethic 🙂 🌟🏆
Another thing that’s great about using rubrics to grade group work is that your rubrics’ clear criteria and differentiated performance level descriptors will make your grading more consistent, fair, and transparent! Your kids will know your exact expectations from the start, and you can justify your grading objectively. (Great for dealing with that common, whining complaint, “But this is all just subjective!!!”) 📚📝
My students love group work and WANT to do it, but they are sometimes apprehensive about the whole grading aspect and whether or not they will get stuck with a free-rider or somebody who doesn’t work nicely with others. Because I am super proactive about working with them on group-work skills just as much as we’re working on the academic project they’re doing, they quickly realize they don’t have to dread collaborative learning, even when it’s graded! 😊👩🎓
If you want your kids to reap the benefits of cooperative learning, but struggle with the many pitfalls of group work in the high school classroom, rubrics that are standards-aligned to the ELA content you’re working on AND the 21st-century skills for collaboration can be part of your solution. More than just an assessment tool, they frame the entire group project experience for the students so that they understand how it’s not just about their presentation or finished product, but it also really is about their soft skills, too. 🌐👥
If you apply some of the advice I’ve shared in this post, I promise you’ll spend less time managing group dynamics (and dysfunction) and more time helping students master the communication, collaboration, and responsibility competencies they’ll need to succeed in school AND the workforce! 🎓💼
GET MY THREE GROUP WORK RUBRICS HERE!
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