Division of Labor in a Group Project Is Division of Learning

Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.

In a lot of classroom group projects,

the strongest student does everything.

They carry their entire group.

And the weaker students don’t really learn anything.

It’s a structural failure mode of education.

I know, I know.

From the outside, it can look pretty collaborative.

Makes for a good photo op.

Everyone’s discussing, engaged.

Or so it looks…

But the thing is:

Engagement does not imply learning.

Learning requires direct contact with the work.

Pushing it forward yourself in a productive way.

You need to attempt to retrieve things that you’ve learned, do it successfully, make a few mistakes, correct them, repeat again…

All right, you did it right this time.

Now you’ve learned.

And somebody else cannot do that process for you.

You don’t learn by watching somebody else do that process.

You gotta do it yourself.

That’s why:

Division of labor in a group project is ultimately division of learning.

Concentrating that labor on one student…

The smart kid who’s carrying their whole group, doing all the work for them…

That is a concentration of learning on that one student.

Further reading: True active learning means… .

Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.