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 don’t really learn anything.

This is a structural failure mode of of education.

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 gotta attempt to retrieve things that you’ve learned, and if you make a mistakes, you gotta correct them, and try again again. All right, I did it right this time. Now you’ve learned.

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 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 them… that is a concentration of learning on that one student.

Further reading: True active learning means… .

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