Division of Labor is Division of Learning

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In a lot of classroom group projects, the strongest student does everything. They carry their entire group, and the weaker students just don’t really learn anything.

And that’s not just some minor classroom inconvenience. That, uh, this is a structural failure mode of learning, of education.

From the outside, it can look pretty collaborative, right? 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 gotta attempt to retrieve things that you’ve learned, do so successfully, make a few mistakes, correct them, repeat again.

All right, I 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. So division of labor in a group project is, it’s ultimately division of learning.

And concentrating that labor on one student, the smart kid who’s carrying their whole group, doing all the work for ‘em, that is a concentration of learning on that one student.

Further reading: True active learning means… .

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