the group assignment

Ideas for Great Group Work

Many students, particularly if they are new to college, don’t like group assignments and projects. They might say they “work better by themselves” and be wary of irresponsible members of their group dragging down their grade. Or they may feel group projects take too much time and slow down the progression of the class. This blog post by a student— 5 Reasons I Hate Group Projects —might sound familiar to many faculty assigning in-class group work and longer-term projects in their courses.

We all recognize that learning how to work effectively in groups is an essential skill that will be used by students in practically every career in the private sector or academia. But, with the hesitancy of students towards group work and how it might impact their grade, how do we make group in-class work, assignments, or long-term projects beneficial and even exciting to students?

The methods and ideas in this post have been compiled from Duke faculty who we have consulted with as part of our work in Learning Innovation or have participated in one of our programs. Also included are ideas from colleagues at other universities with whom we have talked at conferences and other venues about group work practices in their own classrooms.

Have clear goals and purpose

Students want to know why they are being assigned certain kinds of work – how it fits into the larger goals of the class and the overall assessment of their performance in the course. Make sure you explain your goals for assigning in-class group work or projects in the course. You may wish to share:

• Information on the importance of developing skills in group work and how this benefits the students in the topics presented in the course.
• Examples of how this type of group work will be used in the discipline outside of the classroom.
• How the assignment or project benefits from multiple perspectives or dividing the work among more than one person.

Some faculty give students the option to come to a consensus on the specifics of how group work will count in the course, within certain parameters. This can help students feel they have some control over their own learning process and and can put less emphasis on grades and more on the importance of learning the skills of working in groups.

Choose the right assignment

Some in-class activities, short assignments or projects are not suitable for working in groups. To ensure student success, choose the right class activity or assignment for groups.

• Would the workload of the project or activity require more than one person to finish it properly?
• Is this something where multiple perspectives create a greater whole?
• Does this draw on knowledge and skills that are spread out among the students?
• Will the group process used in the activity or project give students a tangible benefit to learning in and engagement with the course?

Help students learn the skills of working in groups

Students in your course may have never been asked to work in groups before. If they have worked in groups in previous courses, they may have had bad experiences that color their reaction to group work in your course. They may have never had the resources and support to make group assignments and projects a compelling experience.

One of the most important things you can do as an instructor is to consider all of the skills that go into working in groups and to design your activities and assignments with an eye towards developing those skills.

In a group assignment, students may be asked to break down a project into steps, plan strategy, organize their time, and coordinate efforts in the context of a group of people they may have never met before.

Consider these ideas to help your students learn group work skills in your course.

• Give a short survey to your class about their previous work in groups to gauge areas where they might need help: ask about what they liked best and least about group work, dynamics of groups they have worked in, time management, communication skills or other areas important in the assignment you are designing.
• Allow time in class for students in groups to get to know each other. This can be a simple as brief introductions, an in-class active learning activity or the drafting of a team charter.
• Based on the activity you are designing and the skills that would be involved in working as a group, assemble some links to web resources that students can draw on for more information, such as sites that explain how to delegate and share responsibilities, conflict resolution, or planning a project and time management. You can also address these issues in class with the students.
• Have a plan for clarifying questions or possible problems that may emerge with an assignment or project.   Are there ways you can ask questions or get draft material to spot areas where students are having difficulty understanding the assignment or having difficulty with group dynamics that might impact the work later?

Designing the assignment or project

The actual design of the class activity or project can help the students transition into group work processes and gain confidence with the skills involved in group dynamics.   When designing your assignment, consider these ideas.

• Break the assignment down into steps or stages to help students become familiar with the process of planning the project as a group.
• Suggest roles for participants in each group to encourage building expertise and expertise and to illustrate ways to divide responsibility for the work.
• Use interim drafts for longer projects to help students manage their time and goals and spot early problems with group projects.
• Limit their resources (such as giving them material to work with or certain subsets of information) to encourage more close cooperation.
• Encourage diversity in groups to spread experience and skill levels and to get students to work with colleagues in the course who they may not know.

Promote individual responsibility

Students always worry about how the performance of other students in a group project might impact their grade. A way to allay those fears is to build individual responsibility into both the course grade and the logistics of group work.

• Build “slack days” into the course. Allow a prearranged number of days when individuals can step away from group work to focus on other classes or campus events. Individual students claim “slack days” in advance, informing both the members of their group and the instructor. Encourage students to work out how the group members will deal with conflicting dates if more than one student in a group wants to claim the same dates.
• Combine a group grade with an individual grade for independent write-ups, journal entries, and reflections.
• Have students assess their fellow group members. Teammates is an online application that can automate this process.
• If you are having students assume roles in group class activities and projects, have them change roles in different parts of the class or project so that one student isn’t “stuck” doing one task for the group.

Gather feedback

To improve your group class activities and assignments, gather reflective feedback from students on what is and isn’t working. You can also share good feedback with future classes to help them understand the value of the activities they’re working on in groups.

• For in-class activities, have students jot down thoughts at the end of class on a notecard for you to review.
• At the end of a larger project, or at key points when you have them submit drafts, ask the students for an “assignment wrapper”—a short reflection on the assignment or short answers to a series of questions.

Further resources

Information for faculty

Best practices for designing group projects (Eberly Center, Carnegie Mellon)

Building Teamwork Process Skills in Students (Shannon Ciston, UC Berkeley)

Working with Student Teams   (Bart Pursel, Penn State)

Barkley, E.F., Cross, K.P., and Major, C.H. (2005). Collaborative learning techniques: A handbook for college faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R., & Smith, K. (1998). Active learning: Cooperation in the college classroom. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company.

Thompson, L.L. (2004). Making the team: A guide for managers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc.

Information for students

10 tips for working effectively in groups (Vancouver Island University Learning Matters)

Teamwork skills: being an effective group member (University of Waterloo Centre for Teaching Excellence)

5 ways to survive a group project in college (HBCU Lifestyle)

Group project tips for online courses (Drexel Online)

Group Writing (Writing Center at UNC-Chapel Hill)

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Many students have had little experience working in groups in an academic setting. While there are many excellent books and articles describing group processes, this guide is intended to be short and simply written for students who are working in groups, but who may not be very interested in too much detail. It also provides teachers (and students) with tips on assigning group projects, ways to organize groups, and what to do when the process goes awry.

Some reasons to ask students to work in groups

Asking students to work in small groups allows students to learn interactively. Small groups are good for:

• generating a broad array of possible alternative points of view or solutions to a problem
• giving students a chance to work on a project that is too large or complex for an individual
• allowing students with different backgrounds to bring their special knowledge, experience, or skills to a project, and to explain their orientation to others
• giving students a chance to teach each other
• giving students a structured experience so they can practice skills applicable to professional situations

Some benefits of working in groups (even for short periods of time in class)

• Students who have difficulty talking in class may speak in a small group.
• More students, overall, have a chance to participate in class.
• Talking in groups can help overcome the anonymity and passivity of a large class or a class meeting in a poorly designed room.
• Students who expect to participate actively prepare better for class.

Caveat: If you ask students to work in groups, be clear about your purpose, and communicate it to them. Students who fear that group work is a potential waste of valuable time may benefit from considering the reasons and benefits above.

Large projects over a period of time

Faculty asking students to work in groups over a long period of time can do a few things to make it easy for the students to work:

• The biggest student complaint about group work is that it takes a lot of time and planning. Let students know about the project at the beginning of the term, so they can plan their time.
• At the outset, provide group guidelines and your expectations.
• Monitor the groups periodically to make sure they are functioning effectively.
• If the project is to be completed outside of class, it can be difficult to find common times to meet and to find a room. Some faculty members provide in-class time for groups to meet. Others help students find rooms to meet in.

Forming the group

• Forming the group. Should students form their own groups or should they be assigned? Most people prefer to choose whom they work with. However, many students say they welcome both kinds of group experiences, appreciating the value of hearing the perspective of another discipline, or another background.
• Size. Appropriate group size depends on the nature of the project.  If the group is small and one person drops out, can the remaining people do the work? If the group is large, will more time be spent on organizing themselves and trying to make decisions than on productive work?
• Resources for students. Provide a complete class list, with current email addresses. (Students like having this anyway so they can work together even if group projects are not assigned.)
• Students that don't fit. You might anticipate your response to the one or two exceptions of a person who really has difficulty in the group. After trying various remedies, is there an out—can this person join another group? work on an independent project?

Organizing the work

Unless part of the goal is to give people experience in the process of goal-setting, assigning tasks, and so forth, the group will be able to work more efficiently if they are provided with some of the following:

• Clear goals. Why are they working together? What are they expected to accomplish?
• Ways to break down the task into smaller units
• Ways to allocate responsibility for different aspects of the work
• Ways to allocate organizational responsibility
• A sample time line with suggested check points for stages of work to be completed

Caveat: Setting up effective small group assignments can take a lot of faculty time and organization.

Getting Started

• Groups work best if people know each others' names and a bit of their background and experience, especially those parts that are related to the task at hand. Take time to introduce yourselves.
• Be sure to include everyone when considering ideas about how to proceed as a group. Some may never have participated in a small group in an academic setting. Others may have ideas about what works well. Allow time for people to express their inexperience and hesitations as well as their experience with group projects.
• Most groups select a leader early on, especially if the work is a long-term project. Other options for leadership in long-term projects include taking turns for different works or different phases of the work.
• Everyone needs to discuss and clarify the goals of the group's work. Go around the group and hear everyone's ideas (before discussing them) or encourage divergent thinking by brainstorming. If you miss this step, trouble may develop part way through the project. Even though time is scarce and you may have a big project ahead of you, groups may take some time to settle in to work. If you anticipate this, you may not be too impatient with the time it takes to get started.

Organizing the Work

• Break up big jobs into smaller pieces. Allocate responsibility for different parts of the group project to different individuals or teams. Do not forget to account for assembling pieces into final form.
• Develop a timeline, including who will do what, in what format, by when. Include time at the end for assembling pieces into final form. (This may take longer than you anticipate.) At the end of each meeting, individuals should review what work they expect to complete by the following session.

Understanding and Managing Group Processes

• Groups work best if everyone has a chance to make strong contributions to the discussion at meetings and to the work of the group project.
• At the beginning of each meeting, decide what you expect to have accomplished by the end of the meeting.
• Someone (probably not the leader) should write all ideas, as they are suggested, on the board, a collaborative document, or on large sheets of paper. Designate a recorder of the group's decisions. Allocate responsibility for group process (especially if you do not have a fixed leader) such as a time manager for meetings and someone who periodically says that it is time to see how things are going (see below).
• What leadership structure does the group want? One designated leader? rotating leaders? separately assigned roles?
• Are any more ground rules needed, such as starting meetings on time, kinds of interruptions allowed, and so forth?
• Is everyone contributing to discussions? Can discussions be managed differently so all can participate? Are people listening to each other and allowing for different kinds of contributions?
• Are all members accomplishing the work expected of them? Is there anything group members can do to help those experiencing difficulty?
• Are there disagreements or difficulties within the group that need to be addressed? (Is someone dominating? Is someone left out?)
• Is outside help needed to solve any problems?
• Is everyone enjoying the work?

Including Everyone and Their Ideas

Groups work best if everyone is included and everyone has a chance to contribute ideas. The group's task may seem overwhelming to some people, and they may have no idea how to go about accomplishing it. To others, the direction the project should take may seem obvious. The job of the group is to break down the work into chunks, and to allow everyone to contribute. The direction that seems obvious to some may turn out not to be so obvious after all. In any event, it will surely be improved as a result of some creative modification.

Encouraging Ideas

The goal is to produce as many ideas as possible in a short time without evaluating them. All ideas are carefully listened to but not commented on and are usually written on the board or large sheets of paper so everyone can see them, and so they don't get forgotten or lost. Take turns by going around the group—hear from everyone, one by one.

One specific method is to generate ideas through brainstorming. People mention ideas in any order (without others' commenting, disagreeing or asking too many questions). The advantage of brainstorming is that ideas do not become closely associated with the individuals who suggested them. This process encourages creative thinking, if it is not rushed and if all ideas are written down (and therefore, for the time-being, accepted). A disadvantage: when ideas are suggested quickly, it is more difficult for shy participants or for those who are not speaking their native language. One approach is to begin by brainstorming and then go around the group in a more structured way asking each person to add to the list.

Examples of what to say:

• Why don't we take a minute or two for each of us to present our views?
• Let's get all our ideas out before evaluating them. We'll clarify them before we organize or evaluate them.
• We'll discuss all these ideas after we hear what everyone thinks.
• You don't have to agree with her, but let her finish.
• Let's spend a few more minutes to see if there are any possibilities we haven't thought of, no matter how unlikely they seem.

Group Leadership

• The leader is responsible for seeing that the work is organized so that it will get done. The leader is also responsible for understanding and managing group interactions so that the atmosphere is positive.
• The leader must encourage everyone's contributions with an eye to accomplishing the work. To do this, the leader must observe how the group's process is working. (Is the group moving too quickly, leaving some people behind? Is it time to shift the focus to another aspect of the task?)
• The leader must encourage group interactions and maintain a positive atmosphere. To do this the leader must observe the way people are participating as well as be aware of feelings communicated non-verbally. (Are individuals' contributions listened to and appreciated by others? Are people arguing with other people, rather than disagreeing with their ideas? Are some people withdrawn or annoyed?)
• The leader must anticipate what information, materials or other resources the group needs as it works.
• The leader is responsible for beginning and ending on time. The leader must also organize practical support, such as the room, chalk, markers, food, breaks.

(Note: In addition to all this, the leader must take part in thc discussion and participate otherwise as a group member. At these times, the leader must be careful to step aside from the role of leader and signal participation as an equal, not a dominant voice.)

Concerns of Individuals That May Affect Their Participation

• How do I fit in? Will others listen to me? Am I the only one who doesn't know everyone else? How can I work with people with such different backgrounds and expericnce?
• Who will make the decisions? How much influence can I have?
• What do I have to offer to the group? Does everyone know more than I do? Does anyone know anything, or will I have to do most of the work myself?

Characteristics of a Group that is Performing Effectively

• All members have a chance to express themselves and to influence the group's decisions. All contributions are listened to carefully, and strong points acknowledged. Everyone realizes that the job could not be done without the cooperation and contribution of everyone else.
• Differences are dealt with directly with the person or people involved. The group identifies all disagreements, hears everyone's views and tries to come to an agreement that makes sense to everyone. Even when a group decision is not liked by someone, that person will follow through on it with the group.
• The group encourages everyone to take responsibility, and hard work is recognized. When things are not going well, everyone makes an effort to help each other. There is a shared sense of pride and accomplishment.

Focusing on a Direction

After a large number of ideas have been generated and listed (e.g. on the board), the group can categorize and examine them. Then the group should agree on a process for choosing from among the ideas. Advantages and disadvantages of different plans can be listed and then voted on. Some possibilities can be eliminated through a straw vote (each group member could have 2 or 3 votes). Or all group members could vote for their first, second, and third choices. Alternatively, criteria for a successful plan can be listed, and different alternatives can be voted on based on the criteria, one by one.

Categorizing and evaluating ideas

• We have about 20 ideas here. Can we sort them into a few general categories?
• When we evaluate each others' ideas, can we mention some positive aspects before expressing concerns?
• Could you give us an example of what you mean?
• Who has dealt with this kind of problem before?
• What are the pluses of that approach? The minuses?
• We have two basic choices. Let's brainstorm. First let's look at the advantages of the first choice, then the disadvantages.
• Let's try ranking these ideas in priority order. The group should try to come to an agreement that makes sense to everyone.

Making a decision

After everyone's views are heard and all points of agreement and disagreement are identified, the group should try to arrive at an agreement that makes sense to everyone.

• There seems to be some agreement here. Is there anyone who couldn't live with solution #2?
• Are there any objections to going that way?
• You still seem to have worries about this solution. Is there anything that could be added or taken away to make it more acceptable? We're doing fine. We've agreed on a great deal. Let's stay with this and see if we can work this last issue through.
• It looks as if there are still some major points of disagreement. Can we go back and define what those issues are and work on them rather than forcing a decision now.

How People Function in Groups

If a group is functioning well, work is getting done and constructive group processes are creating a positive atmosphere. In good groups the individuals may contribute differently at different times. They cooperate and human relationships are respected. This may happen automatically or individuals, at different times, can make it their job to maintain the atmospbere and human aspects of the group.

Roles That Contribute to the Work

Initiating —taking the initiative, at any time; for example, convening the group, suggesting procedures, changing direction, providing new energy and ideas. (How about if we.... What would happen if... ?)

Seeking information or opinions —requesting facts, preferences, suggestions and ideas. (Could you say a little more about... Would you say this is a more workable idea than that?)

Giving information or opinions —providing facts, data, information from research or experience. (ln my experience I have seen... May I tell you what I found out about...? )

Questioning —stepping back from what is happening and challenging the group or asking other specific questions about the task. (Are we assuming that... ? Would the consequence of this be... ?)

Clarifying —interpreting ideas or suggestions, clearing up confusions, defining terms or asking others to clarify. This role can relate different contributions from different people, and link up ideas that seem unconnected. (lt seems that you are saying... Doesn't this relate to what [name] was saying earlier?)

Summarizing —putting contributions into a pattern, while adding no new information. This role is important if a group gets stuck. Some groups officially appoint a summarizer for this potentially powerful and influential role. (If we take all these pieces and put them together... Here's what I think we have agreed upon so far... Here are our areas of disagreement...)

Roles That Contribute to the Atmosphere

Supporting —remembering others' remarks, being encouraging and responsive to others. Creating a warm, encouraging atmosphere, and making people feel they belong helps the group handle stresses and strains. People can gesture, smile, and make eye-contact without saying a word. Some silence can be supportive for people who are not native speakers of English by allowing them a chance to get into discussion. (I understand what you are getting at...As [name] was just saying...)

Observing —noticing the dynamics of the group and commenting. Asking if others agree or if they see things differently can be an effective way to identify problems as they arise. (We seem to be stuck... Maybe we are done for now, we are all worn out... As I see it, what happened just a minute ago.. Do you agree?)

Mediating —recognizing disagreements and figuring out what is behind the differences. When people focus on real differences, that may lead to striking a balance or devising ways to accommodate different values, views, and approaches. (I think the two of you are coming at this from completely different points of view... Wait a minute. This is how [name/ sees the problem. Can you see why she may see it differently?)

Reconciling —reconciling disagreements. Emphasizing shared views among members can reduce tension. (The goal of these two strategies is the same, only the means are different… Is there anything that these positions have in common?)

Compromising —yielding a position or modifying opinions. This can help move the group forward. (Everyone else seems to agree on this, so I'll go along with... I think if I give in on this, we could reach a decision.)

Making a personal comment —occasional personal comments, especially as they relate to the work. Statements about one's life are often discouraged in professional settings; this may be a mistake since personal comments can strengthen a group by making people feel human with a lot in common.

Humor —funny remarks or good-natured comments. Humor, if it is genuinely good-natured and not cutting, can be very effective in relieving tension or dealing with participants who dominate or put down others. Humor can be used constructively to make the work more acceptable by providing a welcome break from concentration. It may also bring people closer together, and make the work more fun.

All the positive roles turn the group into an energetic, productive enterprise. People who have not reflected on these roles may misunderstand the motives and actions of people working in a group. If someone other than the leader initiates ideas, some may view it as an attempt to take power from the leader. Asking questions may similarly be seen as defying authority or slowing down the work of the group. Personal anecdotes may be thought of as trivializing the discussion. Leaders who understand the importance of these many roles can allow and encourage them as positive contributions to group dynamics. Roles that contribute to the work give the group a sense of direction and achievement. Roles contributing to the human atmosphere give the group a sense of cooperation and goodwill.

Some Common Problems (and Some Solutions)

Floundering —While people are still figuring out the work and their role in the group, the group may experience false starts and circular discussions, and decisions may be postponed.

• Here's my understanding of what we are trying to accomplish... Do we all agree?
• What would help us move forward: data? resources?
• Let's take a few minutes to hear everyone's suggestions about how this process might work better and what we should do next.

Dominating or reluctant participants —Some people might take more than their share of the discussion by talking too often, asserting superiority, telling lengthy stories, or not letting others finish. Sometimes humor can be used to discourage people from dominating. Others may rarely speak because they have difficulty getting in the conversation. Sometimes looking at people who don't speak can be a non-verbal way to include them. Asking quiet participants for their thoughts outside the group may lead to their participation within the group.

• How would we state the general problem? Could we leave out the details for a moment? Could we structure this part of the discussion by taking turns and hearing what everyone has to say?
• Let's check in with each other about how the process is working: Is everyone contributing to discussions? Can discussions be managed differently so we can all participate? Are we all listening to each other?

Digressions and tangents —Too many interesting side stories can be obstacles to group progress. It may be time to take another look at the agenda and assign time estimates to items. Try to summarize where the discussion was before the digression. Or, consider whether there is something making the topic easy to avoid.

• Can we go back to where we were a few minutes ago and see what we were trying to do ?
• Is there something about the topic itself that makes it difficult to stick to?

Getting Stuck —Too little progress can get a group down. It may be time for a short break or a change in focus. However, occasionally when a group feels that it is not making progress, a solution emerges if people simply stay with the issue.

• What are the things that are helping us solve this problem? What's preventing us from solving this problem?
• I understand that some of you doubt whether anything new will happen if we work on this problem. Are we willing to give it a try for the next fifteen minutes?

Rush to work —Usually one person in the group is less patient and more action-oriented than the others. This person may reach a decision more quickly than the others and then pressure the group to move on before others are ready.

• Are we all ready-to make a decision on this?
• What needs to be done before we can move ahead?
• Let's go around and see where everyone stands on this.

Feuds —Occasionally a conflict (having nothing to do with the subject of the group) carries over into the group and impedes its work. It may be that feuding parties will not be able to focus until the viewpoint of each is heard. Then they must be encouraged to lay the issue aside.

• So, what you are saying is... And what you are saying is... How is that related to the work here?
• If we continue too long on this, we won't be able to get our work done. Can we agree on a time limit and then go on?

For more information...

James Lang, " Why Students Hate Group Projects (and How to Change That) ," The Chronicle of Higher Education (17 June 2022).

Hodges, Linda C. " Contemporary Issues in Group Learning in Undergraduate Science Classrooms: A Perspective from Student Engagement ,"  CBE—Life Sciences Education  17.2 (2018): es3.

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Using Roles in Group Work

Resource overview.

How using roles can improve group work in your class

While collaborative learning through group work has been proven to have the potential to produce stronger academic achievement than other kinds of learning environments (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 2006), it can be challenging to implement successfully because many students come to college without the tools they need to automatically succeed in collaborative learning contexts. One way of providing supportive structures to students in a collaborative learning environment is through assigning roles within group work.

Potential Benefits of Using Assigned Roles in Group Work

Assigning group roles can be a beneficial strategy for successful group work design for a number of reasons:

• Group roles offer an opportunity for high quality, focused interactions between group participants. Participants are more likely to stay on task and pay closer attention to the task at hand when their roles in the collaboration are clear and distinct.
• Group roles provide all students with a clear avenue for participation. Students are less likely to feel left out or unengaged when they have a particular duty that they are responsible for completing. Along the same lines, assigning group roles reduces the likelihood of one individual completing the task for the whole group, or “taking over,” to the detriment of others’ learning.
• Group roles encourage individual accountability. Group members are more likely to hold each other accountable for not completing work if a particular task is assigned to them.
• Group roles allow students to strengthen their communicative skills, especially in areas that they are less confident in volunteering for.
• Group roles can help disrupt stereotypical and gendered role assignments, which can be common in group learning. For example, Hirshfield and Chachra (2015) found that in first-year engineering courses, female students tended to undertake less technical roles and more communicative roles than their male colleagues. By assigning roles during group work, and by asking students to alternate these roles at different points in the semester, students can work past gendered assumptions about themselves and their groupmates.

POGIL: A Model for Role Assignments in Collaborative Learning

One small group learning methodology where the use of group roles is well-defined and researched is the  Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) method . The POGIL method calls for groups of three or four students who work in a team on process-oriented guided inquiry activities in which students construct their knowledge through interactions with others. Traditional POGIL roles for group members are provided below (POGIL, 2016).

• Manager  or  Facilitator : Manages the group by helping to ensure that the group stays on task, is focused, and that there is room for everyone in the conversation.
• Recorder : Keeps a record of those who were in the group, and the roles that they play in the group. The recorder also records critical points from the small group’s discussion along with findings or answers.
• Spokesperson  or  Presenter : Presents the group’s ideas to the rest of the class. The Spokesperson should rely on the recorder’s notes to guide their report.
• Reflector  or  Strategy Analyst : Observes team dynamics and guides the consensus-building process (helps group members come to a common conclusion).

Other Highly Adaptable Roles to Consider

You can adapt roles for different kinds of group tasks. While the POGIL model is a useful place to start, you may find that the tasks associated with your discipline require other kinds of roles for effective group learning. Adding to or reframing POGIL roles can be beneficial in these contexts. Below are some suggestions for additional roles that might be valuable to a variety of learning situations.

• Encourager : Encourages group members to continue to think through their approaches and ideas. The Encourager uses probing questions to help facilitate deeper thinking, and group-wide consideration of ideas.
• Questioner : Pushes back when the team comes to consensus too quickly, without considering a number of options or points of view. The questioner makes sure that the group hears varied points of view, and that the group is not avoiding potentially rich areas of disagreement.
• Checker : Checks over work in problem-solving contexts before the group members finalize their answers.

Strategies for Effective Facilitation of Group Roles

The following suggestions are strategies for effective facilitation of group roles. These strategies are helpful in a wide variety of group work situations, but are essential for group work that will last beyond a single class period, or constitute a significant portion of student grades.

• Be transparent about why you are assigning group roles. This kind of transparency can increase student buy-in by helping them recognize the value in establishing group roles
• Provide students with  a list of roles and brief definitions for each role  at the beginning of the group work activity. Make it clear which tasks are associated with which roles.
• Alternatively, you may find it helpful, especially in advanced-level classes, to encourage students to develop their own roles in groups based on the tasks that they feel will be critical to the group’s success. This strategy provides the students with a larger level of autonomy in their learning, while also encouraging them to use proven structures that will help them be successful.
• Roles can be assigned randomly through a variety of strategies, from who has the next birthday to color-coded post-it notes, or  a place card  that points out roles based on where everyone is sitting.
• Circulate early in the class period to be sure that everyone has been assigned a role, and that everyone is clear about what their responsibilities include.
• Be willing to reinforce the given roles throughout the activity. For roles to work, students have to feel as though they will be held accountable for fulfilling those roles. Therefore, it is critical for you to step in if you see someone taking over someone else’s role or not fulfilling their assigned role. Often gentle reminders about who is supposed to be doing what can be useful interventions. For example, if someone is talking over everyone and not listening to their other groupmates, you might say something like “Remember, as a spokesperson, your job is to represent the ideas of everyone in the group.”
• Talk with students individually if their speech or conduct could be silencing, denigrating, or excluding others. Remember: your silence on this issue may be read as endorsement.
• Changing things up regularly is imperative. If you use group roles frequently, mixing up roles throughout the semester can help students develop communication skills in a variety of areas rather than relying on a single personal strength.
• If this is a long-term group assignment, be sure to provide structures for individual feedback for the instructor and other group member on group dynamics. This could be a formal or informal check in, but it’s critical for students to have a space to voice concerns related to group dynamics—especially if this assignment counts for a large portion of their final grade. This feedback might be provided through an anonymous survey in paper form or through a web-based tool like Qualtrics or a Google form. These check-ins can reduce student anxiety about the potential for uneven group participation.

Overall, using assigned roles in group work provides students with a supportive structure that promotes meaningful collaborative learning. While group learning can be challenging to implement effectively, using roles can mitigate some of the challenges associated with learning in groups, while offering students the opportunity to develop a variety of communication skills that will be critical to their success in college and their future careers.

Burke, Alison. (2011). Group work: How to use groups effectively.  The Journal of Effective Teaching , 11(2), 87-95.

Beebe, S.A., & Masterson, J.T. (2003).  Communicating in small groups . Boston, MA: Pearson Education.

Cheng, W. Y., Lam, S. F., & Chan, C. Y. (2008). When high achievers and low achievers work in the same group: The roles of group heterogeneity and processes in project‐based learning.  British Journal of Educational Psychology ,  78 (2), 205-221.

Eberlein, T., Kampmeier, J., Minderhout, V., Moog, R.S., Platt, T., Varma-Nelson, P., White, H.B. (2008). Pedagogies of engagement in science: A comparison of PBL, POGIL and PLTL.  Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, 36 (4), 262-73.

Hale, D., & Mullen, L. G. (2009). Designing process-oriented guided-inquiry activities: A new innovation for marketing classes.  Marketing Education Review ,  19 (1), 73-80.

Hirshfield, L., & Chachra, D. (2015). Task choice, group dynamics and learning goals: Understanding student activities in teams.  2015 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference: Launching a New Vision in Engineering Education Proceedings, FIE 2015 , 1-5.

Johnson, C. (2011). Activities using process‐oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL) in the foreign language classroom.  Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German ,  44 (1), 30-38.

Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., and Smith, K.A. (2006).  Active learning: Cooperation in the university classroom . Edina, MN: Interaction.

Moog, R.S. (2014). Process oriented guided inquiry learning. In M.A. McDaniel, R. F. Frey, S.M. Fitzpatrick, & Roediger, H.L. (Eds.).  Integrating cognitive science with innovative teaching in STEM disciplines  (147-166). St. Louis: Washington University in St. Louis Libraries.

The POGIL Project. (2017). https://pogil.org/

Springer, L., Stanne, M.E., & Donovan, S.S. (1999). Effects of small-group learning on undergraduates in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology: A meta-analysis.  Review of Educational Research, 96 (1), 21-51.

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Center for Teaching Innovation

How to evaluate group work.

Students working in small groups often learn more and demonstrate better retention than students taught in other instructional formats. When instructors incorporate group assignments and activities into their courses, they must make thoughtful decisions regarding how to organize the group, how to facilitate it, and how to evaluate the completed work.

Instructor Evaluations

• Create a rubric to set evaluation standards and share with students to communicate expectations.
• Assess the performance of the group and its individual members.
• Give regular feedback so group members can gauge their progress both as a group and individually.
• Decide what criteria to base final evaluations upon. For example, you might weigh the finished product, teamwork, and individual contributions differently.
• Consider adjusting grades based on peer evaluations.

Peer Evaluations

Consider providing a rubric to foster consistent peer evaluations of participation, quality, and quantity of work.

• This may reveal participation issues that the instructor might not otherwise know about.
• Students who know that their peers will evaluate them may contribute more to the group and have a greater stake in the project.
• Completing evaluations early in the project allows groups to assess how they can improve.

General Strategies for Evaluation

• Groups need to know who may be struggling to complete assignments, and members need to know they cannot sit back and let others do all the work. You can assess individual student progress by giving spot quizzes and evaluate group progress by setting up meetings with each group to review the project status.
• Once or twice during the group task, ask group members to fill out a group and/or peer evaluation to assess team effectiveness. Consider asking “What action has each member taken that was helpful for the group? What action could each member take to make the group more effective?”
• Help students reflect on what they have learned and how they have learned it. Consider asking students to complete a short survey that focuses on their individual contributions to the group, how the group interacted together, and what the individual student learned from the project in relation to the rest of the course.
• Explain your grading system to students before they begin their work. The system should encourage teamwork, positive interdependence, and individual accountability. If you are going to consider the group’s evaluation of each member’s work, it is best to have students evaluate each other independently and confidentially.

Example Group Work Assessment Rubric

Here is an example of a group work assessment rubric. Filling out a rubric for each member of the group can help instructors assess individual contributions to the group and the individual’s role as a team player.

This rubric can also be used by group members as a tool to guide a mid-semester or mid-project discussion on how each individual is contributing to the group.

Total Points ______

Notes and Comments:

Gueldenzoph, L. E., & May, G. L. (2002). Collaborative peer evaluation: Best practices for group member assessments.  Business Communication Quarterly, 65 (1), 9-20.

Johnston, L., & Miles, L. (2004). Assessing contributions to group assignments.  Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 29 (6), 751-768.

Oakley, B., Felder, F. M., Brent, R., & Elhajj, I, (2004). Turning student groups into effective teams.  Journal of Student Centered Learning, 2 (1) 9-34.

Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Assignments

• Annotated Bibliography
• Analyzing a Scholarly Journal Article
• Group Presentations
• Dealing with Nervousness
• Using Visual Aids
• Grading Someone Else's Paper
• Types of Structured Group Activities
• Group Project Survival Skills
• Leading a Class Discussion
• Multiple Book Review Essay
• Reviewing Collected Works
• Writing a Case Analysis Paper
• Writing a Case Study
• About Informed Consent
• Writing Field Notes
• Writing a Policy Memo
• Writing a Reflective Paper
• Writing a Research Proposal
• Generative AI and Writing
• Acknowledgments

A group project is a cooperative learning assignment that requires students to work with peer group members to plan, discuss, and complete a specific project, often over the course of an entire semester. The project can be a research paper, an in-class oral presentation, an out-of-class study project, or research contributed as part of a larger class project involving multiple student groups . The purpose is to prepare students to work collaboratively in order to develop the intellectual and social skills needed to examine research problems from a variety of perspectives, to communicate effectively with their peers, and to evaluate and resolve issues on their own with support from other group members.

Burke, Alison. “Group Work: How to Use Groups Effectively.” The Journal of Effective Teaching 11 (2011): 87-95; Colbeck, Carol L., Susan E. Campbell, and Stefani A. Bjorklund. “Grouping in the Dark: What College Students Learn from Group Projects.” The Journal of Higher Education 71 (January - February, 2000): 60-83; Using Group Projects Effectively. Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation, Carnegie Mellon University; Williams, Katherine. Group Work Benefits and Examples. Study.com.

Benefits of Group Work

As stressful as it can be, group work can actually be beneficial in the long run because it closely parallels the dynamics of serving on a committee, participating in a task force, or working on a collaborative project found in most professional workplace settings. Whatever form the group assignment takes in your course, the opportunity to work with others, rather than on your own, can provide distinct benefits. These include:

• Increased productivity and performance -- groups that work well together can achieve much more than individuals working on their own. A broader range of skills can be applied to practical activities and the process of sharing and discussing ideas can play a pivotal role in deepening your understanding of the research problem. This process also enhances opportunities for applying strategies of critical inquiry and creative or radical problem-solving to an issue.
• Skills development -- being part of a team will help you develop your interpersonal skills. This can include expressing your ideas clearly, listening carefully to others, participating effectively in group deliberations, and clearly articulating to group members t he results of your research . Group work can also help develop collaborative skills, such as, team-based leadership and effectively motivating others. These skills will be useful throughout your academic career and all are highly sought after by employers.
• Knowing more about yourself -- working with others will help identify your own strengths and weaknesses in a collaborative context. For example, you may be a better leader than listener, or, you might be good at coming up with the 'big idea' but not so good at developing a specific plan of action. Enhanced self-awareness about the challenges you may have in working with others will enhance overall learning experiences. Here again, this sense about yourself will be invaluable when you enter the workforce.

Colbeck, Carol L., Susan E. Campbell, and Stefani A. Bjorklund. “Grouping in the Dark: What College Students Learn from Group Projects.” The Journal of Higher Education 71 (January - February, 2000): 60-83; Collaborative Learning/Learning with Peers. Institute for Writing Rhetoric. Dartmouth College; Golde, Chris M. Tips for Successful Writing Groups. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Presented November, 1994; Updated November, 1996 at Association for the Study of Higher Education; Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Collaborative Pedagogy." In Composition Pedagogies: A Bibliographic Guide . Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 54-71; Thom, Michael. "Are Group Assignments Effective Pedagogy or a Waste of Time? A Review of the Literature and Implications for Practice." Teaching Public Administration 38 (2020): 257-269;

Stages of Group Work

I.  Getting Started

To ensure that your group gets off to a good start, it may be beneficial to:

• Take time for all members to introduce themselves, including name, background, and stating specific strengths in contributing to the overall goals of the assignment.
• Nominate or vote to have someone act as the group leader or facilitator or scheduler. If the burden might be too great, consider deciding to rotate this responsibility among all group members.
• Exchange current contact information, such as, email addresses, social media information, and cell phone numbers.
• Consider creating an online workspace account to facilitate discussions, editing documents, sharing files, exchanging ideas, and to manage a group calendar. There are many free online platforms available for this type of work such as Google docs.

II.  Discussing Goals and Tasks

After you and the other members of the group agree about how to approach the assignment, take time to make sure everyone understands what it is they will need to achieve. Consider the following:

• What are the goals of the assignment? Develop a shared understanding of the assignment's expected learning outcomes to ensure that everyone knows what their role is supposed to be within the group.
• Note when the assignment is due [or when each part is due] so that everyone is on the same schedule and any potential conflicts with assignment due dates in other classes can be addressed ahead of time by each members of the group.
• Discuss how you are going to specifically meet the requirements of the assignment. For example, if the assignment is to write a sample research grant, what topic are you going to research and what organizations would you solicit funding from?
• If your professor allows considerable flexibility in pursuing the goals of the assignment, it often helps to brainstorm a number of ideas and then assess the merits of each one separately. As a group, reflect upon the following questions: How much do you know about this topic already? Is the topic interesting to everyone? If it is not interesting to some, they may not be motivated to work as hard as they might on a topic they found interesting. Can you do a good job on this topic in the available time? With the available people? With the available resources? How easy or hard would it be to obtain good information on the topic? [ NOTE:   Consult with a librarian before assuming that information may be too difficult to find!].

III.  Planning and Preparation

This is the stage when your group should plan exactly what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and determine who should do what. Pay attention to the following:

• Work together to break the project up into separate tasks and decide on the tasks or sub-tasks each member is responsible for. Make sure that work is equally distributed among each member of the group.
• Agree on the due-dates for completing each task, keeping in mind that members will need time to review any draft documents and the group must have time at the end to pull everything together.
• Develop mechanisms for keeping in touch, meeting periodically, and the preferred methods for sharing information. Discuss and identify any potential stumbling blocks that may arise that could hinder your work [e.g., mid-terms].

NOTE:   Try to achieve steps 1, 2, and 3 in a group meeting that is scheduled as soon as possible after you have received the assignment and your group has been formed. The sooner these preliminary tasks are agreed upon, the sooner each group member can focus on their particular responsibilities.

IV.  Implementation

While each member carries out their individual tasks, it is important to preserve your group's focus and sense of purpose. Effective communication is vital, particularly when your group activity extends over an extended period of time. Here are some tips to promote good communication:

• Keep in touch with each other frequently, reporting progress regularly. When the group meets for the first time, think about about setting up a regular day and time for people to report on their progress [either in-person or online].
• If someone is having trouble completing his or her area of responsibility, work with that person to figure out how to solve the problem. Be supportive and helpful, but don't offer to do other people's work.
• At the same time, make it clear that the group is depending on everyone to do their part; all group members should agree that it is detrimental to everyone in the group for one person to show up at the last minute without his or her work done.

V.  Finishing Up

Be sure to leave enough time to put all the pieces together before the group project is due and to make sure nothing has been forgotten [e.g., someone forgot to correct a chart or a page is missing]. Synthesizing each group member's work usually requires some negotiation and, collectively, overcoming any existing obstacles towards completion. Technically, this can be done online, but it is better to meet in person to ensure that everyone is actively involved in the process.

If your group has to give a presentation about the results of their research, go through the same process--decide who is going to do what and give everyone enough time to prepare and practice ahead of time [preferably together]. At this point before the assignment is due, it is vital to ensure that you pay particular attention to detail, tie up any loose ends, and review the research project together as a team rather than just looking over individual contributions.

VI.  Writing Up Your Project

Writing the group report can be challenging; it is critical that you leave enough time for this final stage. If your group decided to divide responsibility for drafting sections, you will need to nominate a member of the group [if not done so already] to bring everything together so that the narrative flows well and isn't disjointed. Make it their assignment rather than assigning that person to also write a section of the report. It is best to choose whomever in your group is the best writer because careful copy editing at this stage is essential to ensure that the final document is well organized and logically structured.

Focus on the following:

• Have all the writers in your group use the same writing style [e.g., verb tense, diction or word choice, tone, voice, etc.]?
• Are there smooth transitions between individual sections?
• Are the citations to sources, abbreviations, and non-textual elements [charts, graphs, tables, etc.] consistent?

Barkley, Elizabeth F., Claire Howell Major, and K. Patricia Cross. Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty . 2nd edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2014; Boud, David, Ruth Cohen, and Jane Sampson, editors. Peer Learning in Higher Education: Learning from and with Each Other . Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2001; Collaborative Learning/Learning with Peers. Institute for Writing Rhetoric. Dartmouth College; Espey, Molly. "Enhancing Critical Thinking using Team-Based Learning." Higher Education Research and Development 37 (2018): 15-29; Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Collaborative Pedagogy." In Composition Pedagogies: A Bibliographic Guide . Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 54-71; INDOT Group Work and Report Planning Handout. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Working in Groups. Academic Skills Centre. University of Canberra; Working in Groups. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University; Group Writing. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Golde, Chris M. Tips for Successful Writing Groups. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Presented November, 1994; Updated November, 1996 at Association for the Study of Higher Education.

Meeting Places

Where Your Group Meets Matters!

Choosing where to you meet can have as much of an impact on your group's overall success as how well you communicate and work together. When your group is first formed, be sure to set aside some time to discuss and come to an agreement about where to meet in the future. Obviously, convenience has a lot to do with your possible choices. However, discussions of where to meet should also focus on identifying a space that's comfortable, easily accessible to everyone, and does not have any distractions, such as, the smell of food from nearby, heavy foot traffic, or constant noise,

Places that meet all of these conditions are the collaborative workrooms in the East Asian Library of Doheny or the group study spaces in the Lower Computer Commons of Leavey Library or on the second floor of Leavey Library. These rooms can seat anywhere from 4 to 10 people and all have dry erase boards and power and network connectivity. Most rooms also have large monitors with laptop connections that your group can use to display a presentation, document, spreadsheet, or other information that is the focus of your collaborative work. Note that these rooms are very popular, especially towards the end of the semester, so schedule early and be courteous in promptly cancelling your reservation so others may use the room. Finally, if everyone agrees that meeting in person is not crucial, a meeting to discuss the group's activities can be conducted over Zoom or other video conferencing platform.

Bilandzic, Mark and Marcus Foth. "Libraries as Coworking Spaces: Understanding User Motivations and Perceived Barriers to Social Learning," Library Hi Tech 31 (2013): 254-273.

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How Do I Facilitate Effective Group Work?

Successful group work is characterized by trust, psychological safety, clarity of expectations, and good communication; being in the same location while working is not essential to group effectiveness (Duhigg, 2016; Kelly, 2008; Salmons, 2019). Below we offer strategies and examples that work for short-term collaborative group work (e.g., discussions in an online, hybrid/flexible, or in-person class) and long-term collaborative assignments (e.g., group projects), ending with additional considerations for long-term collaborative work.

STRATEGIES & EXAMPLES

Provide opportunities to develop connection and trust.

Engage students with community building activities.  Groups work best when students feel connected and trust each other. Brief  icebreaker activities  are fun and allow students to get to know each other before delving into group work. If using a video conferencing platform such as Zoom or Echo360, ask students to type a word or emoji about how they are doing into the chat, or during in-person classes students can share this orally or via an audience response system. Let students practice group work in  Moodle  or  Blackboard  with some low-stakes group assignments.

Create group norms.  In the first few weeks of class, create participation norms that all students agree upon as a class or within their small groups. Discuss with students how certain social identities (e.g., women in STEM, transgender students) can be unintentionally marginalized during group work as a justification for creating norms around respectful and inclusive communication (Oakley, Felder, Brent, & Elhajj, 2004). Vary the groupings of students so that students can meet other students and hear different perspectives, particularly in the first weeks of class. Refer back to the agreed-upon norms when conflict arises.

Proactively check in with groups.  It’s important to pay attention to both process and the accomplished task. As you drop into groups during class time or consult with groups in office hours, note who does and does not speak; consider asking questions about process such as who is generating ideas and how they know everyone is on board with these ideas. Check in individually with quieter students. Remember, how you address group functioning models how they should interact with each other (Kelly, 2008).

(Over)communicate and Reinforce Expectations

Communicate the purpose.  Communicate in writing and orally the skills students will develop by the end of their group work experience and why this is a valuable task or project to do in groups (as opposed to individually). You might ask students to connect skills they will learn to their personal goals and describe how they will know if they’ve developed these skills apart from your feedback.

Describe the tasks.  In writing, describe the tasks in detail, including steps in the process with due dates/deadlines, resources needed, technology for communication, and expectations for group work. This means giving students clear topics, questions, deliverables, or goals for group work. Consider assigning rotating task roles such as discussion director, connector, summarizer, recorder, and reporter (Kennedy & Nilson, 2008). Create a space online for students to submit questions which are publicly answered for all to see; this can become an  FAQ forum . At the end of group work, have groups submit something that demonstrates their engagement with the task for a small amount of points, such as group decisions, remaining questions, or discussion notes.

Clarify the criteria.  Communicate specific details about how student work generated in groups will be assessed (i.e., rubrics, exemplars, grading scheme). Use positive, “do this” language rather than negative, “don’t do this” language when possible. Show examples that typify important or challenging aspects of the work with narrations (i.e., on video or in a commented document) of what makes the work exemplar.

Additional Tips for Long-term Collaborative Projects

Be sure students have a communication plan.  This can be specified as part of their group norms and processes at the beginning of the project. In addition, be clear how and when groups should communicate with you, where and in what format they should submit materials, and what to do if they encounter a problem.

Break apart the project into phases or milestones with clear deliverables at each stage.  Clearly specify how and where students should turn in work (i.e., online or in person), and use this format consistently for all deliverables.

Have students periodically check in about their group process and report back on their process.  At the beginning of the project, ask students to identify how they want to work together, what their expectations are for each other, and what collaborative tools the group wants to use. Have them post their group norms in an online forum. Include a requirement for a  "team effectiveness discussion"  or evaluation (self or peer) after students have some time to work together (e.g., 2nd milestone; See  Oakley et al. 2004  for a “Crisis Clinic” guide). Allow them to adjust norms and set goals for the next phase of group work.

Clearly connect homework, lectures, or other learning activities to the group project.  For example, after learning new concepts, students might be asked to turn in a brief “Application memo” which connects course content to their group project. An online session might end with an “Integrate it” discussion among group members to integrate new learning into their project. Homework might be called “Project Prep.” Name activities by their purpose so that students see the relevance and utility of each activity more easily.

Foster cross-group peer review.  Students will appreciate hearing what other groups are doing and can get ideas for their own projects. For example, have students share their milestones or group work with another group and have them record questions and feedback in a collaborative document. Review that document to provide feedback to the entire class, saving you from giving feedback to each group. Peer review can also be done as a workshop or group assignment activity in the LMS. 

Please contact the CTL with any questions or for more details about the examples shared at  [email protected] . For support with collaborative technology, email  [email protected] .

For questions on your LMS, Google, and other educational technology contact IDEAS at [email protected]

Duhigg, C. (2016, February 25).  What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team . The New York Times.

Kelly, R. (2008, August 11).  Creating trust in online education ,  Faculty Focus.

Kennedy, F. A., and Nilson, L. B. (2008).  Successful strategies for teams. Team Member Handbook .  Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation, Clemson University.

Oakley, B., Felder, R. M., Brent, R., & Elhajj, I. (2004).  Turning student groups into effective teams .  Journal of Student Centered Learning, 2 (1), pp. 9-34.

Salmons, J. (2019).  Learning to collaborate, collaborating to learn: Engaging students in the classroom and online . Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Image by Armin Rimoldi for Pexels.

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Students engage and participate when there is a class climate in which they feel safe, supported, and encouraged to express their thoughts, values, experiences, and perspectives.

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Note catchers, shared collaborative documents accessed in real time, keep students focused and help you monitor online or in-person group work.

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• Group work: Goals, roles, and ground rules

Group work: Goals, roles, & ground rules

You've been given your assignment and have your group members in place. Your next step is to set up your group's goals, roles, and ground rules to make the most of your time working together. Taking a few minutes at the start of your assignment to cover this will often proactively address any issues that may arise during group projects. 

Let's look into each of these a bit more:

Ground Rules

Use our downloadable Group Work Roadmap [ .doc / .pdf ]  to take the guesswork out of this process.

Group Goals

In this first step, you are ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding what mark you want for your project, what date you will submit your project, and determining your specific project topic or focus if given choice in your assignment.

Know from day one if your group is aiming for a final grade in the 70s, 80s, or 90s. Also, discuss if this mark is one you can comfortably achieve or if it is one you will strive for. This will help set both the tone for the group and the expectation for submissions.

As a group, collectively decide on a date for final review and submission. As you will have many people working on many parts try to build in time for group reviews of the final draft of a project well ahead of the required due date. This will allow time for additions or upgraded work ahead of the due date.

As a group, discuss the project's outline and be sure to come to a consensus about what is expected. Brainstorm and discuss topics if your professor allows self-selection. This will set your group up for drafting task assignments and ensuring everyone is working toward a common goal.

Group Roles

Now that your group has established the "what" of the project, you need to consider the "who" and the "when".

Each member should have an equal amount of tasks they will carry from the group's workload. This does not necessarily mean an equal number of tasks across all members as some tasks may be very large and others very small. As a group, look at your assignment and begin to break down the project into various tasks.

Once all tasks are written out, have each member indicate if there are any particular tasks they are best equipped for or are interested in doing. For tasks which remain after this initial selection process begin to delegate these out in an equitable fashion. This can be done through another round of self-selection, random draw, or any number of processes. Review again the overall workload being tasked to each member - does the amount of time and effort seem equal? Finally, collectively create a schedule of mini-deadlines each task must be drafted, reviewed, and submitted within the overall timeline of the project. 

Another role to be considered is that of the draft reviewer. Each member's tasks should be shared with another member once a final draft has been created. This review period should allow time for feedback and for the draft creator to be able to implement any changes agreed upon.

Ground rules for groups cover the details which push your progress along and create fair communication & conflict expectations. Again, using our Group Work Roadmap resource will help navigate many of the ground rules needed to be covered. Considerations include meetings, attendance, communication, and conflict.

• Revisit the date chosen for the final draft submission review by the group and set a tentative date to all meet and discuss.
• Reviewing the mini-deadlines, or your own class schedules, establish meeting dates throughout the project's timeline to meet together as a group. This could be weekly, biweekly, or staggered dates throughout.
• Determine how long these meetings will be scheduled to last.
• Determine where meetings will take place; it doesn't have to be the same place every time.  If meeting online, determine what tool you will use and try to pick one that everyone is comfortable with using.
• Determine the proper process for notifying the group if you will miss a meeting.
• Determine the plan of action if there is a member who continues to miss or be late for meetings.
• Determine how an emergency meeting will be requested/announced.
• Communication
• What will be the primary platform for asynchronous group communication? (e.g. email? an instant messaging system?)
• What will be the primary platform for asynchronous individual communication (e.g. sending drafts or reviews of drafts)?
• Review and agree to use  healthy communication dynamics .
• Determine how information from meetings will be shared with members who were unavoidably absent.
• Discuss how the group will provide constructive feedback to members for absent, subpar, or low-effort submissions.
• Discuss the escalation process that will be followed in determining when to alert your instructor of a failing group member.
• Discuss how the group will respectfully get back on task when a group member(s) are off-topic, coopting too much time/energy of a meeting, or have become too fixated on an individual issue that is not impacting the group.

"Setting Expectations & Ground Rules" [Algonquin College Library; YouTube]

Whether big or small, using our Group Work Roadmap  can help give a physical space for your group to document many of the choices made concerning goals, roles, and ground rules. Taking a couple of minutes to complete this at the start of your project will give everyone a clear path to navigate and clear expectations of them by the group. The more transparent these factors are, the less likely you are to encounter misunderstanding-based conflicts.

Algonquin College of Applied Arts & Technologies. (2021, June 3). Essential study skills: Group work . Algonquin College of Applied Arts & Technologies: Student Support Services. https://algonquincollege.libguides.com/studyskills/group-work

Carnegie Mellon University. (n.d.). Sample group project tools: team contract template . Carnegie Mellon University: Eberly Center. Retrieved March 9, 2022 from https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/instructionalstrategies/groupprojects/tools/TeamContracts/teamcontracttemplate.docx

Carnegie Mellon University. (n.d.). What are the challenges of group work and how can I address them ? Carnegie Mellon University: Eberly Center. Retrieved March 9, 2022 from https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/instructionalstrategies/groupprojects/challenges.html

Indeed Editorial Team. (2021, June 9). Four common types of team conflict and how to resolve them . Indeed. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/types-of-team-conflict

La Trobe University. (2020, September 18). Common types of group conflicts and how to resolve them . La Trobe University. https://www.latrobe.edu.au/mylatrobe/common-types-of-group-conflicts-and-how-to-resolve-them/

Levin, P., and Kent, I. (2001). Draft manual on teamwork tutoring: 28 questions and answers for academics on teamwork in universities .

Oregon State University. (n.d.). Team work makes the dream work: make your group project awesome like a blessing of unicorns. Oregon State University: Academic Success Center. Retrieved March 9, 2022 from https://success.oregonstate.edu/sites/success.oregonstate.edu/files/LearningCorner/Tools/4-page_twdw_-_fill_-_20.pdf

University of British Columbia. (n.d.). Resolving conflict. University of British Columbia: Chapman Learning Commons. Retrieved March 11, 2022 from https://learningcommons.ubc.ca/student-toolkits/working-in-groups/resolving-conflict/.

University of Waterloo. (n.d.). Teamwork skills: Being an effective group member . University of Waterloo: Centre for Teaching Excellence. Retrieved March 9, 2022 from https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teaching-resources/teaching-tips/tips-students/being-part-team/teamwork-skills-being-effective-group-member

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• Mar 25, 2021

Assigning Roles to Increase the Effectiveness of Group Work

Updated: May 17, 2023

Karen De Meyst , Miami University

Jonathan Grenier , Miami University

Although group assignments have many benefits, instructors may encounter a wide variety of problems. Common problems include students not contributing to the project, one student dominating the group, or students having different expectations about group performance and workload (Burke, 2011). In this article, we suggest assigning roles to group members to mitigate these problems, thereby increasing team effectiveness and efficiency.

Assigning Roles to Group Members

Most studies on the use of group roles focus on settings where students have to work together for in-class activities. The literature suggests multiple benefits of this practice for outside-of-class group work. Specifically, studies on in-class group activities find increased participation, less freeriding, increased knowledge acquisition, and reduced student distraction (Cohn, 1999; Coggeshall, 2010; Hirshfield & Chachra, 2015; Schellens et al. 2005; Shimazoe & Aldrich, 2010). To test the effectiveness of this approach for larger, outside-of-class group projects, we implemented it in an accounting course.

Implementation

Specifically, we tested this approach in an upper-level undergraduate accounting course at Miami University. For this course, students had to complete four group projects. The instructor assigned students to groups of five or six students at the start of the semester, and groups remained the same throughout the semester. In addition, the instructor explained that for each group project, students would have to assign roles among group members. The list of roles included a manager as the leader of the group, a planner responsible for planning meetings and sending reminders, an editing specialist, a technology specialist, a checker responsible for knowing and verifying compliance with the assignment requirements, and two questioners who were required to play the devil's advocate. Given that there were seven roles in total and that all roles had to be fulfilled for each project, if a group had less than seven members in the group, students would have to take on two roles.

Further, students had to take on a different role for each project. In this way, they developed multiple skills. This also reduced the risk that one student would dominate the group (Cottell & Millis, 1992; Rosser, 1998). As students assigned roles among themselves, students could start in roles they found most comfortable and maximize group members' strengths (Andrist, 2015). It was also important to hold students accountable for the roles they fulfilled (TTC, 2018). Thus, students had to communicate to the instructor the roles assigned for each project. Although all group members received the same grade for the group projects, the instructor knew who was responsible if the group failed to meet a requirement. Overall, the instructor emphasized that all group members remained responsible for the submission content and group roles related to the coordination of the work.

Student Reactions

To examine the effectiveness of assigning roles to group members, we compared students' survey responses, peer evaluations, and the quality of students' submissions in the section of the course in which this approach was implemented to two other sections of the same course without assigned roles. Overall, the survey measured students' perceptions of group dynamics and team performance. Although perceptions of group dynamics did not seem to be affected by assigning roles, results indicated that perceptions of team performance were higher when students assigned roles. Specifically, students perceived the group as better organized, and team members were better at following through on decisions and action items. These differences were statistically significant.

Students were also asked to describe in the survey what they enjoyed and what they did not enjoy about the group work in the course. Although not asked for it specifically, different students shared their opinions about the requirement to assign group roles. One student who appreciated this intervention formulated it as follows: "It allowed us to distribute work according to our strengths and helps build communications skills". Other students enjoyed that the roles changed from one project to another, noticed more effective communication and cooperation, and argued that it helped them to hold themselves accountable for their decisions as a group.

Interestingly, a few students were less positive. For example, one student argued that the requirement to assign roles in an upper-level undergraduate course felt immature and unnecessary. Another student suggested that it would be better if roles did not have to change for every project so that students could stay with roles they were good at.

Further, students had to complete peer evaluations for each of their group members. The peer evaluation questionnaires contained three items related to team effectiveness. Averages on these items were consistently higher in the section where students had to assign group roles, but not always significantly higher. The instructor also subjectively assessed the quality of the submissions.

Although there did not seem to be any differences between the quality of the content of the group projects, it was clear that students worked better together as groups as (a) formal requirements were better met, (b) there was increased consistency between the different parts of the group work, and (c) the writing was better.

Considerations

Overall, we found assigning roles to group members can be a good way to improve group work and team effectiveness. However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and different adaptations are possible, depending on the specific characteristics and learning objectives of your group project.

Here are some final considerations to keep in mind when implementing this approach:

Before implementing this approach, it is important to reflect on how beneficial this approach could be for your specific course. What are the problems you are currently experiencing? How could this approach increase the effectiveness of your group projects?

Instructors may want to consider their students and the level of their course in the curriculum. Some students may appreciate that assigning group roles helps coordinate the work. In contrast, students with a more independent attitude – especially at higher levels in the curriculum – may experience this additional formal requirement as unnecessary.

It is important to craft your list of roles carefully based on your group projects' specific characteristics and learning objectives. Some roles discussed above may not be relevant for your projects, while you may think of other roles that could make a difference in your course.

Will the instructor assign roles to group members, or should group members assign roles among themselves? While there are benefits to each approach, this decision should depend on the approach that best fits the learning objectives.

Should roles change during the semester, or can students stay with the same role for different projects? Although the requirement to rotate roles, as discussed above, has its own benefits, it may be a good idea to allow students to stay with the same role such that the group optimally benefits from students' strengths.

How will you hold students accountable for the roles fulfilled? Will there be a grade component related to role fulfillment, or will all group members receive the same grade?

Discussion Questions

What are some problems you are experiencing when assigning group work? How could the practice of assigning group roles mitigate these problems?

What are specific roles that students need to fulfill when completing group projects for your course? Which roles are most important?

How could assigning roles to group members help students meet the learning objectives of your group projects? Which modifications would you have to make for this approach to best fulfill your needs?

Andrist, P. (2015). Team roles and responsibilities. Green River College: Campus Reflection Field Guide – Reflective Techniques to Encourage Student Learning: Background and Examples. https://depts.washington.edu/cpreeuw/wordpress/wp content/uploads/2015/10/GR-FG02.pdf

Burke, A. (2011). Group work: How to use groups effectively. The Journal of Effective Teaching, 11 (2), 87–95. https://uncw.edu/jet/articles/vol11_2/burke.pdf

Coggeshall, B. (2010). Assigning individual roles and its effect on the cooperative learning setting . St. John Fisher College. https://fisherpub.sjf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgiarticle=1098&context=mathcs_etd_masters

Cohn, C. (1999). Cooperative learning in a macroeconomics course. College Teaching, 47 (2), 51–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567559909595784

Cottell, P., & Millis, B. (1992). Cooperative learning in accounting . Journal of Accounting Education, 10, 95–111. https://doi.org/10.1016/0748-5751(92)90019-2

Hirshfield, L., & Chachra, D. (2015). Task choice, group dynamics and learning goals: Understanding student activities in teams. 2015 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference: Launching a New Vision in Engineering Education Proceedings , 1–5. https://doi.org/ 10.1109/FIE.2015.7344043

Rosser, S. (1998). Group work in science, engineering, and mathematics: Consequences of ignoring gender and race. College Teaching, 46 (3), 82–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567559809596243

Schellens, T, Van Keer, H., & Valcke, M. (2005). The impact of role assignment on knowledge construction in asynchronous discussion groups: A multilevel analysis. Small Group Research, 36 (6), 704–745. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1046496405281771

Shimazoe, J., & Aldrich, H. (2010). Group work can be gratifying: Understanding and overcoming resistance to cooperative learning. College Teaching, 58 , 52–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567550903418594

TTC (The Teaching Center Washington University in Saint Louis). (2018). Using roles in group work . https://ctl.wustl.edu/resources/using-roles-in-group-work/

About the Author

• Active Learning
• Engaging Students

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Inclusive Active Participation Through Non-Oral Methods

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Fostering Connectedness in the Asynchronous Online Environment

Common Group Work Challenges and Solutions

Group work necessitates emotional intelligence and  other  skills such as communication, time management, conflict resolution, and recognition of team member differences. A successful group project will provide a framework to ensure students are properly equipped with these skills.   

Scheduling Conflicts

Scheduling conflicts often create roadblocks to getting started or continuing with projects. Group members may feel others aren’t compromising or taking each other’s situations into  consideration. Use the suggestions below to help students communicate effectively and avoid scheduling conflicts.  

• Pre-project scheduling solutions
• Mid-project scheduling solutions
• Request students share their availability prior to group formation so that students with similar schedules can be grouped together.  
• Provide access to virtual meeting spaces through a   web conferencing platform  (e.g., MS Teams, Webex, Zoom).  
• Require that students take turns picking the venue and time of the meeting.  
• Encourage students to be understanding of others’ schedules and responsibilities.  
• Point students to online collaboration tools that facilitate working asynchronously.  

Group Conflict

Conflict is natural and  sometimes   necessary  for effective group work. Sometimes it may escalate and make it difficult for members to focus on the project. Use the solutions below to help avoid and resolve conflict during group activities.  

• Pre-project conflict solutions
• Mid-project conflict solutions
• Provide the time and opportunities for students to build communication, time management, and conflict resolution skills within the classroom setting.  
• Help students to stay focused on the work to be accomplished and to not let personal feelings impact their work in the group by ensuring expectations are clearly defined at the beginning of the project.
• Use office hours to help students find common ground between two ideas to reach reconciliation.  
• Encourage students to address conflicts directly and respectfully.  
• There are instances that, for the well-being of the students, you may need to reform groups.  

Uneven Contributions (Loafing/Overachieving)

Uneven student contribution occurs when some group members don’t (or aren’t perceived to) contribute equally to the group project. Often, this results in tension within the group and feels unfair to group members. There are multiple methods of managing an uneven work distribution, as described below.  

• Pre-project contribution solutions
• Mid-project contribution solutions
• Set clear guidelines and work expectations at the beginning of the group project.  
• Clearly define and assign the group roles and responsibilities so that each person will contribute equally.  
• Increase individual accountability by combining group assessments with individual assessments.   
• Provide a mechanism for teams to dismiss a member. Be sure to have a contingency plan for a dismissed student.  
• Encourage students to speak directly, but respectfully, to the person who is contributing unequally.  
• Ask students to do an anonymous mid-project evaluation of each other’s contributions and performance to assess the group process and monitor dynamics. This can be facilitated through an anonymous peer review using rubrics .  
• Provide multiple in-class “checkpoints” to assess group processes and monitor dynamics.  

Conflicting Expectations

Conflicting expectations arise when group activities are loosely defined. For example, some group members may strive for perfection, while others simply want to pass. Other opportunities for discord arise when discussing deadlines. Some people begin projects in well advance, while others procrastinate. Both examples create tension because the group isn’t working toward the same goal or deadline. The opportunities below will help you frame the group work to ensure a cohesive experience.  

• Pre-project expectations solutions
• Mid-project expectations solutions
• Early communication is key to ensure everyone agrees on common goals. Require teams to determine how they will communicate (e.g., Canvas Inbox, MS Teams).  
• Help students to keep goals realistic by breaking the project down into smaller tasks.  
• In class, give students the opportunity to create a timeline so the group can keep to an agreed-upon plan for completing the project.  
• Ask students to complete a Plus/Delta survey to assess what’s going well and what changes could be made to help the group align their expectations.  
• Rotate responsibilities to provide all group members the opportunity to excel.  

Getting Stuck

All the challenges thus far have focused on conflict. What happens when the group is cohesive but still unable to make progress? Sometimes they get stuck or hit a mental roadblock. This lack of progress can be discouraging and lead to procrastination or avoidance. Read the techniques below to help students find the path forward.  

• Pre-project solutions for getting stuck
• Mid-project solutions for getting stuck
• Precede group brainstorming with a period of individual brainstorming.  
• Create structured opportunities at the halfway point of projects to allow students to reevaluate and revise their strategies and approaches.  
• Assign roles to reduce conformity (devil’s advocate, doubter, the fool)
• Require group members to reflect on and highlight their contributions in a self-evaluation.   
• Build in mechanisms for students to work through projects analytically using the groups’ combined and diverse knowledge and experience.  

As groups navigate the many types of conflict, some students may begin to feel frustrated or unheard. In these instances, there is a tendency for individuals to agree with others to avoid conflict. This is especially problematic as it stifles creativity and constructive evaluation of alternative ideas. Fortunately, groupthink can be prevented through a little intentionality.  

• Pre-project groupthink solutions
• Mid-project groupthink solutions
• Provide an archive of past projects for students to browse. Be sure to follow FERPA guidelines by removing all identifying information such as names and pictures, and deleting author metadata from the document.  
• Break the project down into smaller pieces to prevent overwhelming students.  
• Share sources of inspiration for the project.  
• What is our next task?
• Who should do it?  
• Review the assignment expectations and goals during class  
• Hold a whole-class or group-specific brainstorming session where ideas are discussed.  
• Demonstrate how to create a mind map to link common ideas and trains of thought.  
• Provide time during student office hours to guide groups that may be stuck.  

Isolation of a Group Member

The last challenge we’ll look at can start as an effort to increase the diversity of each group, minimizing the likelihood of students falling into the groupthink mentality. However, research and experience tell us that being the “only” in a group can be isolating. Consider the pre-project solutions below to avoid the isolation of a group member and use the mid-project corrections if a student comes to you with a concern.

• Pre-project isolation solutions
• Mid-project isolation solutions
• If there are a limited number of visibly diverse students, try to keep these underrepresented students together to limit isolation (Bailey, 2020).  
• Establish expectations that require equal contribution and interaction.  
• Ask the class to take a few minutes to write about what helps and hinders their group work experience. Review their comments, share the findings with the class, and provide strategies to address their concerns.   
• Re-assign the student to another group.   
• Review the roles, responsibilities, and expectations with the class.  

Instructor's Guide: Facilitating Group Work When done correctly, group projects can facilitate the development of communication, time management, collaboration, and conflict resolution skills that are vital in the professional world. Set the Stage for Success in Group Projects There are steps you can take as the instructor of the course to help set the stage for student success when assigning group work. Grading Methods for Group Work Once you have the group activity established, you should consider the different methods and tools available for grading group work. References

• Bailey, E. G., et.al. (2020). Female in-class participation and performance increase with more female peers and/or a female instructor in a life sciences course . CBE – Life Sciences Education ,  19 (3).  https://www.lifescied.org/action/cookieAbsent  
• Huang, L. (2018, September 20). Students riding on coattails during group work? Five simple ideas to try. Retrieved from  https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/students-riding-coattails-group-work-five-simple-ideas-try/  

Create group assignments or assign to individual students

Create an assignment in Microsoft Teams for Education and assign it to individual or small groups of students in a class. Groups turn in one copy of the assignment that can be graded separately or together.

Create a new assignment

Navigate to your desired class team and select Assignments .

Select Create > Assignment .

Create a group assignment

If you chose Randomly group students: 

Enter number of groups, then select Create groups .

When everything looks good, select Done . If you decide you need more edits, select Groups of students again.

Finish adding details to your assignment, then select Assign . Note that once an assignment has been distributed to students, you can no longer edit groups.  

If you chose Manually group students:

Select Create groups .

Edit the default group name, if desired.

Select Create .

When you're done, select + New group  and repeat Steps 2 and 3 until all students have been assigned to a group.

Finish adding details to your assignment, then select Assign . Note that once an assignment has been distributed to students, you can no longer edit groups.

Assign to individual students

Select the student dropdown under Assign to . By default, All Students will be selected. Select student names or type to search for a student.

Note:  You can only assign work to individual students in one class at a time.

Once you've selected the students, finish adding details to your assignment.

Select Assign . The students you chose will be notified of their new assignment.

Create an assignment

Grade an assignment

Edit an assignment

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• Relational Aesthetics
• Soviet Union
• Socially Engaged Art
• Conceptual & Post-Conceptual Art
• Art Collectives

Claire Bishop

Participants.

• Collective Actions
• Ilya Kabakov

Zones of Indistinguishability: Collective Actions Group and Participatory Art

The rise of participatory art since the 1990s invites us to constitute a history of this practice, ideally one that reflects the global spread of this work today. 1 In charting this history, important variants appear that challenge the dominant way of thinking about participatory art in Western Europe and North America, where this work tends to be positioned as a political, constructive, and oppositional response to the spectacle’s atomization of social relations. By contrast, the participatory art of Eastern Europe and Russia from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s is frequently marked by the desire for an increasingly subjective and privatized aesthetic experience. At first glance, this seems to be an inversion of the Western model (despite Guy Debord’s observation that bureaucratic communism is no less spectacular than its capitalist variant; it is simply “concentrated” as opposed to “diffused”). 2 However, and crucially, the individual experiences that were the target of participatory art under really existing socialism continue to be framed as shared privatized experiences: the construction of a collective artistic space amongst mutually trusting colleagues. Rather than frame this work as “implicitly political,” as is the habit with current Western approaches to Eastern bloc art history, this essay will argue that work produced under state socialism during these decades should rather be viewed in more complex terms. Given the saturation of everyday life with ideology, Soviet artists did not regard their work as political but rather as existential and a political, committed to ideas of freedom and the individual imagination. At the same time, they sought an expanded—one might say democratized—horizon of artistic production, in contrast to the highly regulated and hierarchized system of the Union of Soviet Artists.

In the present essay, I want to focus on the Collective Actions Group, active in Moscow from the mid-1970s onwards, from the perspective of Western participatory art. Unlike many recent socially-engaged artists, for whom social participation in art denotes the inclusion of the working class, marginalized communities, or at least everyday non-professionals (rather than the artists’s friends and colleagues), the political context of the Collective Actions Group rendered such distinctions redundant. The impulse to collaborate with disenfranchised communities that we see so frequently today was a somewhat alien concept in the 1970s: under Cold War socialism, every citizen was (nominally at least) equal, a co-producer of the communist state. Class difference did not exist. 3 Finding participants for one’s art was therefore a question of selecting reliable colleagues who would not inform on one’s activities. In an atmosphere of near constant surveillance and insecurity, participation was an artistic and social strategy to be deployed only amongst the most trusted groups of friends. The restrictions of life under Cold War communism do more than simply affect the question of who participates in art. They also govern the appearance of these works: materially frugal and temporally brief, many of these actions and events were located in the countryside, far away from networks of surveillance. The fact that many of these actions do not look like art is less an indication of the artists’s commitment to blurring “art and life” than a deliberate strategy of self-protection, as well as a reaction to the state’s own military displays and socialist festivals as a visual reference point; these events dissuaded artists from contrived displays of collective participation even if they had the resources to emulate them. 4

It is useful to remind ourselves that unofficial art began in Moscow in 1964, after Khrushchev visited the thirtieth anniversary show of the Moscow Union of Artists at the Manezh Gallery, which included a display of non-figurative, abstract paintings; Khrushchev declared these to be (among other things) “private psycho-pathological distortions of the public conscience.” 5 The extent of his reaction led to the ever-increasing domestic isolation of independent artists and their being denied the right to show their works to the public in any place or form. And yet, despite being severely criticized and censured, unofficial art continued into the mid-1970s, when the first legal exhibitions took place and a shadow union for unofficial artists was set up (the Graphics Moscow City Committee). After the controversial Bulldozer exhibition of September 1974 (in which an exhibition of unofficial art was destroyed by bulldozer), cultural authorities decided to regulate and legalize their relationships with “underground” art via the State Committee for Security (KGB). Most unofficial art was exhibited inside private apartments, forcing a convergence of art and life that surpassed what the majority of twentieth-century avant-gardists had ever intended by this term. The phenomenon of “Apt-Art” (apartment art), an initiative by Nikita Alekseev, referred to exhibitions and performances taking place in private homes for small networks of trusted friends; Apt-Art flourished in the early 1980s.

It was in this context that the most celebrated of Moscow Conceptualists, Ilya Kabakov (b.1933), developed his personal work alongside his official job as a children’s book illustrator. Kabakov’s Albums (1972–75) are illustrated narratives, each revolving around one fictional character, most of whom are isolated, lonely, idiosyncratic figures on the margins of society, cocooned in a private dream world. The first, Sitting in the Closet Primakov , is typical in that it describes the life of a boy who sits in a dark closet and refuses to come out; when he does, he sees the world in terms of modernist abstract paintings. Each Album was accompanied by drawings and general comments on the character spoken by other fictional commentators. Crucially, these Albums were not read as books but were performed by the artist for small groups of friends. Boris Groys recalls that one would make an appointment with Kabakov (rather like organizing a studio visit) and go to his home, where the artist would place the book on a music stand and read the entire text in a neutral and unexpressive tone of voice. The experience was extremely monotonous but had a ritualistic quality in which the turning of the pages became central. Most readings took an hour, although Groys recalls once undergoing an eight-hour performance. 6 One of the key points to emerge here is the use of a neutral, descriptive, analytical language focusing on the inconspicuous, the banal, and the marginal; another is that the stories are geared more towards invented forms of survival and endurance than of criticism; and another is the repeated motif of isolated individuals negotiating the endless and uncomfortable scrutiny of the communal apartment. 7 All of these points provide an important contextual precursor for the work discussed in the remainder of this essay.

It is in this literary context, with a strong reverence for textual expression, that the Collective Actions Group (CAG) ( Kollektivnye Deistvia , or K/D ) was formed in 1976; at its inception there were four members; by 1979 there were seven; and in 2005 there were six. 8 The group took its lead from the first generation of Moscow Conceptualists, especially Kabakov, whose installations implied characters and viewing subjects caught between “a communal body” and “an existential individualist.” 9 The central theorist of CAG, Andrei Monastyrsky (b.1949), has recalled that their earliest pieces were perceived as a form of poetry reading. The group continues to produce around eight performances a year, although the character of this work has changed considerably since 1989: the actions are more complex, with more references to Eastern mysticism, and frequently make use of documentation (especially tape recordings) from earlier actions. Since the focus here is on participatory art under socialism, the following discussion will concern a selection of actions produced in the first decade of the group’s existence. Most of these actions typically followed a standard format: a group of fifteen to twenty participants were invited by telephone (at a time when, of course, phone lines could be tapped) to take a train to a designated station outside Moscow; they would walk from the station to a remote field; the group would wait around (not knowing what would happen), before witnessing a minimal, perhaps mysterious, and often visually unremarkable event. On returning to Moscow, participants would write an account of the experience and offer interpretations of its meaning; these subsequently became the focus of discussion and debate amongst the artists and their circle. 10

It should immediately be apparent that the intellectualism of this structure is a considerable step away from the 1960s model in both Europe and North America, in which it was regarded as sufficient simply for things to “happen,” and through which the participating subject would attain a more vivid, authentic level of reality (as seen, for example, in the work of Knížák and Kaprow). Monastyrsky complicated this paradigm by aiming to produce situations in which participants had no idea what was going to happen, to the point where they sometimes found it difficult to know if they had in fact experienced an action; when participants’s engagement finally occurred, it was never in the place where they expected it. 11 CAG stretched the temporality of event-based art away from pure presence and into a relationship of distance between “then” (I thought I experienced…) and “now” (I understand it to be otherwise…). It is also of central importance that this production of distance was not only temporal but social, prising open a space for modes of communicational practice otherwise absent in the rigid and monolithic ideology of Soviet collectivism. The event itself is effectively an “empty action,” designed to preclude interpretation from taking place during the performance, and thereby serving to prompt a wide range of descriptions and analyses, which were undertaken individually but shared within the group.

The first key action that crystallized this form of working was Appearance (March 13, 1976). Devised by Monastyrsky, Lev Rubinstein, Nikia Alekseev, and Georgii Kizevalter, it involved around thirty audience members as participants. Upon arriving in a remote field at Izmaylovskoe, the group was asked to wait and watch for something to appear in the distance. Eventually, a couple of the organizers became visible on the horizon, in what Monastyrsky refers to as the “zone of indistinguishability”: the moment when one can tell that something is happening but the figures are too far away for one to clarify who they are and what exactly is taking place. The figures approached the group and gave them certification of having attended the event (CAG refers to this as “factography”). Monastyrsky later explained that what had happened in the field was not that they (the organizers) had appeared for the participants, but rather, that the participants had appeared for them . This inversion of what one might expect to experience with an artistic action—an unfurling of events for the organizers rather than for an audience—was matched by the group’s preference for the banality of waiting rather than the production of a vivid and visually memorable event: Monastyrsky described the participants’s eventual appearance in the work as a “pause,” thereby reconceptualizing the waiting not as a prelude to some more specific action, but as the main event. 12 Typically, CAG’s primary focus is never on the ostensible action taking place in the snowy landscape, but rather the deferral and displacement of this action both physically (events happen where one was not prepared to see them) and semantically. The phenomenological level of immediate events was subordinated to the conceptual and linguistic activity that subsequently took place in the participants’s consciousness: in Monastyrsky’s words, the mythological or symbolic content of the action is “used only as an instrument to create that ‘inner’ level of perception” in the viewer. 13

This technique can be seen in other early works such as Pictures (February 11, 1979), which divided the participants into two groups, one of which undertook an action in the snow, watched by the other group. Twelve sets of twelve colored envelopes (in gradually larger sizes) were distributed to twelve of the thirty participants. Inside each envelope was a description of the key components of the event: from schedule, setting, and weather to audience reaction, meaning, and interpretation. After they had read the instructions, the participants were told to fold and paste each set of envelopes on top of each other, with the largest on the bottom, to form a concentric pattern of color; these were later signed as certification of the participants’s attendance. While all this was going on, three of the participants (the organizers) crossed the field and wandered into the woods on the other side. Once again, the “zone of indistinguishability” was put into play: the participants’s preoccupation with making the pictures was a distraction from the action on the margin, namely the organizers’s disappearance into the woods. The participatory activity (finding and assembling the colored envelopes) was undermined as a central focus by the sly subtraction of the organizers’s presence, indicating that—contra the US model of the Happening—in CAG’s works there is no authentic shared experience underlying the event.

In his article “Seven Photographs” (1980), Monastyrsky presents seven near identical photographs of a snowy field, each of which relate to a different action by CAG, including Appearance and Pictures . The bleak similarity of the images is amusing, but drives home his point that secondary material such as photographs, instructions, descriptions, and participant recollections have a completely separate aesthetic reality to the action itself. (At best, he writes, “a familiarity with the photographs and texts can bring about a sensation of positive indeterminacy.” 14 ) Influenced by semiotics and making frequent reference to Heidegger, Monastyrsky argues that the group’s actions result for the participants in a real experience, but not in an image of that experience. The event’s existential presence takes place in the viewer’s consciousness (as a state of “completed anticipation”) and thus cannot be represented: “The only thing that can be represented is the thing that accompanies this internal process, the thing that takes place on the field of action at the time.” 15 The exquisite precision of this idea, in which documentation is conceived as a representation of what accompanied an artistic experience, explains the repetitive quality of CAG’s photographs of (apparently) nothing taking place, since they record only what seems to be a withdrawal of action. Each photograph is to be considered, Monastyrsky writes, as “a sign of a higher order, a sign of an ‘unarbitrary emptiness’ with the following meaning: ‘nothing is represented on it not because nothing happened at that given moment, but because the thing that happened is essentially unrepresentable.’” 16 The highly theorized, quasi-mystical flavor of this position gives CAG a unique status within a history of performance documentation, while also being highly suggestive of an approach to documentary that is ripe for re-exploration today.

Monastyrsky’s article was written before Ten Appearances (1981) and seems to pave the way for the centrality of photography in this work. The participants in Ten Appearances were notified that everyone attending would have to participate in the work; those who were unwilling should not come. 17 ], 151. Trans. Anya Pantuyeva.)] The action took place in a snowy field and was organized around a flat board bearing dozens of nails with bobbins, each wound with 200–300 meters of white thread. The assignment was for each of the ten participants to take a thread and walk away from the board in a different direction towards the forest that surrounded the field. Kabakov describes the minutiae of his volatile emotions as he underwent this process: from anxiety (about how long he would be standing in the cold) to fear (suspecting the organizers of sadism) to sheer joy and “mystic melancholy” on finally reaching the end of the thread, to which was affixed a piece of paper bearing the “factographic text” (the name of the organizers, time, date, and place of the action). 18 At this point it was up to the participants to decide what happened next. Eight of them walked back out of the forest to rejoin the group; two did not return and got a train back to Moscow. Those who returned were given a photograph of themselves emerging from the forest in the “zone of indistinguishability,” with each image captioned “The appearance of [name] on February 1, 1981.” This simulated photographic documentation had been taken a few weeks earlier but was indistinguishable from the actual appearance of the participants as they emerged from the forest. Monastyrsky refers to these photographs as an “empty act”: a mere sign of the elapsed time between the end of the first phase of the action for the participants (receiving the factographic text) and their reappearance in the field (“the signified and culminating event in the structure of the action”). 19 Both the act and the image are empty signifiers; the meaning is formulated subsequently by reflection on the totality of the events experienced.

Of course, the poignant fact that two participants, Nekrasov and Zhigalov, didn’t return to the group did not mean that the work was a failure. Rather, Monastyrsky asserted, it showed that the participants had emerged from a “non-artistic, non-artificially-constructed space”—in other words, an everyday reality in which they were capable of acting of their own free will. 20 This, Monastyrsky reasoned, was why the same people kept coming back to their events over the course of fifteen years: the pretextual nature of the experiences that the group constructed ensured that participants were continually intrigued, as well as continually motivated to write descriptions and analyses. Since it was near impossible to scrutinize the events as they were happening, these hermeneutical narratives had a compensatory aspect, endlessly chasing a meaning that remained elusive, precisely because the generation of different interpretative positions was the meaning. 21 The surfeit of texts that resulted from these actions were collected into books every three to five years, and are published in Russian and German under the title Trips to the Countryside ; the group is currently at work on an eleventh volume. 22 Volume two, from 1983, for example, is typical in its structure: a theoretical preface by Monastyrsky; descriptions of the events with photographs; an appendix of documentation, which includes the schema of Ten Appearances and a list of slides; texts by participants (including Kabakov on Ten Appearances ); photographs and descriptions of actions by individual artists that are close to CAG’s actions, such as Monastyrsky’s Flat Cap (1983); commentaries and photographs. Later volumes also include interviews and a list of videos, produced after the German artist Sabine Hänsgen joined the group.

Boris Groys has observed how CAG’s performances were “meticulously, almost bureaucratically, documented, commented on, and archived.” 23 This textual production is one of the dominant characteristics of their practice, and positions it as the inverse of the impulse to make participatory art in Western cultures—which can broadly be summarized as positioned against the atomization of social relations under consumer spectacle. Groys has argued that Soviet society, by contrast,

was a society of production without consumption. There was no spectator and there was no consumer. Everyone was involved in a productive process. So the role of Collective Actions and some other artists of the time was to create the possibility of consumption, the possibility of an external position from which one could enjoy communism. 24

What CAG’s works gave rise to, then, was not unified collective presence and immediacy but its opposite: difference, dissensus, and debate; a space of privatized experience, liberal democratic indecision, and a plurality of hermeneutical speculation at a time when the dominant discourse and spectatorial regime was marshaled towards a collective and rigidly schematized apparatus of meaning. This is borne out by Monastyrsky’s observation that

in the Stalin or Brezhnev era, contemplation of an artwork involved a certain compulsion, a kind of tunnel vision. There was nothing peripheral. But when one comes to a field—when one comes there, moreover, with no sense of obligation but for private reasons of one’s own—a vast flexible space is created, in which one can look at whatever one likes. One’s under no obligation to look at what’s being presented—that freedom, in fact, is the whole idea. 25

The use of a field as the backdrop to so many of CAG’s works is therefore doubly salient. 26 It did not designate a specific rejection of the city or a conscious embrace of nature; as Sergei Sitar notes, the field is not chosen for its independent aesthetic merits, “but simply as ‘the lesser evil’—as a space that is the least occupied, the least appropriated by the dominant cultural discourse.” 27 For Monastyrsky, it is a space “free from any affiliation”: “the countryside, for us, isn’t the countryside tilled by peasants but that of the thinking classes’s vacation retreats.” 28 The fields are less about framing (in the way that Prague’s Wenceslas Square frames Jiří Kovanda’s contemporaneous actions) than un framing; the countryside’s multiple perspectives corresponded to the group’s open-ended, neutral actions that were contrived to leave room for the greatest number of hermeneutic possibilities. The result was a privatized liberal space that existed in covert parallel to official social structures. As Kabakov recalls:

From the moment I got on the train … my goals, the questions and affairs that constantly preoccupied me, my fears of myself and others, were all, as it were, taken away from me. The most remarkable thing, however, was that those who led us had no goals either! And, of course, there is something else: for the first time in my life, I was among “my own”; we had our own world, parallel to the real one, and this world had been created and compressed by the CA group until it had achieved complete materiality, or, one might say, tangibility—if this notion is at all applicable to something absolutely ethereal and elusive. 29

And again, in concluding his account of Ten Appearances :

This [action] actualized one of the most pleasant and practically unknown sides of the socius, the socius that is so painful in our time. Here the social is not antagonistic to you, but instead good-willed, reliable, and extremely welcoming. This feeling is so unusual, so not experienced before, that it not only recovers you, but also becomes an amazing gift compared to everyday reality. 30

Between Monastyrsky’s highly theoretical musings on semiotics and orientalism, and the more accessible narratives of those who participated in the works, it was this emphasis on freedom—the self-selecting construction of a self-determining social group—that formed the social core of CAG’s practice. Participation here denoted the possibility of producing individual affect and singular experience, relayed through a meditative relationship to language that in turn presupposed collective reception and debate.

Participatory art under state socialism in the 1960s and 1970s provides an important counter-model to contemporaneous examples from Europe and North America. Rather than aspiring to create a participatory public sphere as the counterpoint to a privatized world of individual affect and consumption, artists working collaboratively under socialism sought to provide a space for nurturing individualism (of behavior, actions, interpretations) against an oppressively monolithic cultural sphere in which artistic judgments were reduced to a question of their position within Marxist-Leninist dogma. This led to a situation in which most artists wanted nothing to do with politics—and indeed even rejected the dissident position—by choosing to operate, instead, on an existential plane: making assertions of individual freedom, even in the slightest or most silent of forms. 31 We can also contrast this approach with that taken by artists in South America, where participation was used as a means to provoke art audiences into heightened self-awareness of their social conditions and thereby (it was hoped) to impel them to take action in the social sphere. For artists living under communism, participation had no such agitationary goals. It was, rather, a means of experiencing a more authentic (because individual and self-organized) mode of collective experience than the one prescribed by the state in official parades and mass spectacles; as such it is frequently figured as escapist or celebratory, regardless of whether it took place on a physical or solely cerebral level. Today, the escapist and celebratory tend to be weak terms in contemporary art criticism, signifying a willful refusal of artists to engage in their political reality and to express a critical stance towards it. However, the example of the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde under socialism reminds us that there is an unimaginably large gap between managing such contextual awareness and heroic acts of dissidence (the latter being, for the most part, a Western fantasy). The reality of daily life under these regimes necessitates a more sober understanding of the artistic gestures achieved there, and appreciation of the consummate subtlety with which so many of them were undertaken.

This essay forms part of a chapter in my forthcoming book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2011).

“The spectacle exists in a concentrated or a diffuse form depending on the necessities of the particular stage of misery which it denies and supports. In both cases, the spectacle is nothing more than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of misery … If every Chinese must learn Mao, and thus be Mao, it is because he can be nothing else. Wherever the concentrated spectacle rules, so does the police.” Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), sections 63 and 64.

Of course, memories of class difference were not entirely erased. In “The Power of the Powerless,” Václav Havel speaks of his social awkwardness at having to work in a brewery in the mid-1970s (Havel, Open Letters (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 173–4). The artist Vladimír Boudník (1924–68) worked in a print factory and declared, a good decade before Joseph Beuys did, that everyone was an artist. He viewed his art as having an educative mission: he produced work in the streets (late 1940s–50s), finding images in peeling paint and stains on walls, occasionally adding to them, and framing them (for example with paper), before encouraging passers-by to converse with him about their meaning. See Vladimír Boudník (Prague: Gallery, 2004). Mílan Knížák was aware of Boudník’s work, and some of his early actions make reference to everyday workers. For example, Anonymous (1965) involved scattering the following script in the street: “1. A HAPPENING for street sweepers and janitors. 2. ENVIRONMENT for pedestrians. 3. DELIGHT for the creator, resulting from the action.” See Milan Knížák, Actions For Which at Least Some Documentation Remains, 1962–1995 (Prague: Gallery, 2000), 73.

The socialist calendar in Slovakia, for example, included organized mass parades for Victorious February (February 25), International Women’s Day (March 8), International Workers’s Day (May 1), Liberation Day (May 9), International Children’s Day (June 1), Nationalization (October 28), and the Great October Socialist Revolution (November 7). See Mira Keratova, “Vivez sans temps mort,” Transforming 68/89 (Berlin: Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, 2008), 528–37. For the Yugoslav context, see Branislav Jakovljevic, “Balkan Baroque: Yugoslav Gestural Culture and Performance Art,” 1968–1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change , eds. Claire Bishop and Marta Dzeiwańska (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 31–50.

Andrei Erofeev, “Nonofficial Art: Soviet Artists of the 1960s” (1995), Primary Documents : A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s , eds. Laura J. Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 42. See also William J. Tompson, Khrushchev: A Political Life (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1995), Chapter 10.

Groys, conversation with the author, New York, January 28, 2010.

“The communal apartment is a place where the social dimension occurs in its most horrifying, most obtrusive, and most radical form, where the individual is laid bare to the gaze of others. Furthermore, this gaze belongs to largely hostile strangers who consistently exploit their advantages of observation in order to gain advantage in the power struggle within the communal apartment.” Boris Groys, “The Theatre of Authorship,” Ilya Kabakov: Installations 1983–2000, Catalogue Raisonné Vol. 1, ed. Toni Stoos (Kunstmuseum Bern: Richter Verlag, 2003), 40.

According to an interview with Monastyrsky in Flash Art (October 2005): 114. The initial group consisted of Nikia Alekseev, Georgii Kizevalter, Andrei Monastyrsky, and Nikolai Panitkov, later joined by Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, and Sergei Romashko. On the literary aspects of Moscow Conceptualism, Kabakov has noted the central role of the Russian literary tradition of the nineteenth century: “Literature took upon itself all moral, philosophical, pedagogical, and enlightening functions, concentrating them all in itself and not simultaneously in the plastic arts, which did happen in the West.” Kabakov, “On the Subject of the Local Language,” in Kabakov, Das Leben Der Fliegen (Berlin: Edition Cantz, 1992), 237.

Viktor Misiano, “Solidarity: Collective and Collectiveness in Contemporary Russian Art,” in WHW, Collective Creativity (Kassel: Fridericianum, 2005), 185.

It should be noted that CAG also designed actions for individuals or pairs; for example, For N Panitkov (Three Darknesses) , 1980; For G Kizevalter (Slogan-1980) , 1980; The Encounter , 1981; For N Alekseev , 1981. It was rarer for actions to take place in private apartments ( Playback , 1981) or in the city streets ( Exit , 1983; The Group , 1983).

Monastyrsky refers to this as a psychological state of “pre-expectation,” created through the form of the invitation and through the spatio-temporal peculiarities of the journey to the site of the event. See Monastyrsky, “Preface to the First Volume of Trips to the Countryside,” Total Enlightenment: Conceptual Art in Moscow 1960–1990 , ed. Boris Groys (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle/Hatje Cantz, 2008), 335.

“And yet, if the experience so far was that of pure expectation, this experience now transforms upon the appearance of the object of perception on the real field. It is interrupted , and there begins a process of strenuous looking, accompanied by the desire to understand what this object means. In our view, this new stage of perception constitutes a pause. While it is a necessary stage in the process of perception, it is by no means the event for the sake of which all of this was arranged” (ibid., 336).

Ibid., 333.

Andrei Monastyrsky, “Seven Photographs,” trans. Yelena Kalinsky, available at → (last accessed July 23, 2009).

This, reports Kabakov, was unusual in setting up a particular experience of expectation: “one was going there with the idea of participation, and one was wondering what would happen” (Ilya Kabakov, “Ten Appearances,” in Kollektivnye deistviya, Poezdki za gorod [Moskva: Ad marginem, 1998

Ibid., 151–2.

Andrey Monastyrsky, “Ten Appearances” (1981), reprinted in Participation , ed. Claire Bishop (London: Whitechapel and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 129.

This is what I understand him to mean by the following dense sentence: “The fact that of the ten possible appearances only eight, and not all ten, came to pass, represents in our view not a failing of the action but, on the contrary, underscores the realization of zones of psychic experience of the action as aesthetically sufficient on the plane of the demonstrational field of the action as a whole” (ibid). This is corroborated by Kabakov’s more amenable narrative: “I had some space of freedom and I had to make up my mind what to do then. But actually, I had no doubt or speculation about what to do—to leave, etc.—not at all. What I wanted to do immediately was to share this joy I experienced with the others, and also thank those people who made it happen for me” (Kabakov, “Ten Appearances,” 153).

Viktor Tupitsyn: “The same happens in combat: while you’re in the thick of it, everyone is so busy with the ‘physical stuff’ that all kinds of hermeneutic activities are foreclosed. Later, though, this void is going to be filled with interpretations, whose excessiveness will compensate for the lack of interpretation at the site of Action.” Monastyrsky: “Exactly! … Quite a number of texts about our Actions were composed by both spectators and organizers, who were equally fond of writing down what had really happened—first Kabakov, followed by Leiderman, and then by Bakshtein and others. They were impelled to do so in order to compensate for the impossibility of commenting on and interpreting the Actions as they occurred.” Tupitsyn and Monastyrsky, unpublished interview, 1997, archive of Exit Art, New York.

English translations of the works and photo-documentation can be found at → (last accessed July 23, 2009).

Groys, “Communist Conceptual Art,” in Groys, Total Enlightenment: Conceptual Art in Moscow 1960-1990 (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle/Hatje Cantz, 2008), 33.

Groys, in Claire Bishop and Boris Groys, “Bring the Noise,” Tate Etc . (Summer 2009): 38.

Tupitsyn and Monastyrsky, unpublished interview, 1997, archive of Exit Art, New York. However, it’s worth noting that Monastyrsky goes on to assert (contra Groys) that CAG sought to erase the distinction between work of art and spectator and with it the critical distance that might constitute the political:

The snowy fields have variously been compared to Malevich’s White Paintings and the white pages of Kabakov’s albums. It is worth noting that CAG was not the first to use white fields as the site for art: Francisco Infante had also deployed the field as a backdrop for photo-conceptualist works in the late 1960s, such as Dedication (1969), a Malevich-style constructivist composition made of coloured papers on white snow.

Sergei Sitar, “Four Slogans of ‘Collective Actions,’” Third Text 17:4 (2003): 364.

Tupitsyn and Monastyrsky, unpublished interview, 1997, archive of Exit Art, New York.

Cited in “Serebrianyi Dvorets,” a conversation between Ilya Kabakov and Victor Tupitsyn, Khudozhestvennyi Zhurnal No. 42 (2002): 10–14. Cited in Viktor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious: Communal (Post-)Modernism in Russia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 70.

Kabakov, “Ten Appearances,” 154. Translated by Anya Pantuyeva.

See for example the interview with Joseph Beuys undertaken by two Russians, V. Bakchahyan and A. Ur, in the samizdat magazine A-YA at the time of Beuys’s Guggenheim retrospective. Their questions make explicit their wariness of art having anything to do with social change, since the work of the avant-garde post-1917 was so flagrantly co-opted by political officials to be a harbinger of communism: “Our Russian experience shows that to flirt with politics is dangerous for an artist … Aren’t you afraid that the artist who’s inside you is being conquered by the politician?” (V. Backchahyan and A. Ur, “Joseph Beuys: Art and Politics,” A-YA 2 (1980): 54–5).

Claire Bishop (b.1971) is Associate Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Her publications include Installation Art: A Critical History (2005), and the edited anthologies Participation (2006), and 1968-1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change (2010). She co-curated the exhibition “Double Agent” at the ICA London in 2008, and the performance festival “Prelude.11” at the Graduate Center in 2011. She is a regular contributor to Artforum and her second monograph, “Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship”, will be published by Verso in 2012.

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Eberly Center

Teaching excellence & educational innovation, what are the challenges of group work and how can i address them.

Unfortunately, groups can easily end up being less, rather than more, than the sum of their parts. Why is this?

In this section, we consider the hazards of group projects and strategies instructors can use to avoid or mitigate them. Find other strategies and examples here or contact the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence for help.

For students, common challenges of group work include:

• Coordination costs
• Motivation costs
• Intellectual costs

For instructors, common challenges involve:

• Allocating time
• Teaching process skills
• Assessing process as well as product
• Assessing individual as well as group learning

Challenges for students

Coordination costs represent time and energy that group work consumes that individual work does not, including the time it takes to coordinate schedules, arrange meetings, meet, correspond, make decisions collectively, integrate the contributions of group members, etc. The time spent on each of these tasks may not be great, but together they are significant.

Coordination costs can’t be eliminated, nor should they be: after all, coordinating the efforts of multiple team members is an important skill. However, if coordination costs are excessive or are not factored into the structure of group assignments, groups tend to miss deadlines, their work is poorly integrated, motivation suffers, and creativity declines.

Instructors should note that coordination costs increase with:

• Group size: The more people in the group, the more schedules to accommodate, parts to delegate, opinions to consider, pieces to integrate, etc. Smaller groups have lower coordination costs.
• Task interdependence: Tasks in which group members are highly reliant on one another at all stages tend to have higher coordination costs than tasks that allow students to “divide and conquer”, though they may not satisfy the same collaborative goals.
• Heterogeneity: Heterogeneity of group members tends to raises coordination costs, especially if there are language issues to contend with, cultural differences to bridge, and disparate skills to integrate. However, since diversity of perspectives is one of the principle advantages of groups, this should not necessarily be avoided.

Strategies: To help reduce or mitigate coordination costs:

• Keep groups small.
• Designate some class time for group meetings.
• Use group resumes or skills inventories to help teams delegate subtasks.
• Assign roles (e.g., group leader, scheduler) or encourage students to do so.
• Point students to digital tools that facilitate remote and/or asynchronous meetings.
• Warn students about time-consuming stages and tasks.
• Actively build communication and conflict resolution skills.
• Designate time in the project schedule for the group to integrate parts.

Motivation costs refers to the adverse effect on student motivation of working in groups, which often involves one or more of these phenomena:

• Free riding occurs when one or more group members leave most or all of the work to a few, more diligent, members. Free riding – if not addressed proactively – tends to erode the long-term motivation of hard-working students.
• Social loafing describes the tendency of group members to exert less effort than they can or should because of the reduced sense of accountability (think of how many people don’t bother to vote, figuring that someone else will do it.) Social loafing lowers group productivity.
• Conflict within groups can erode morale and cause members to withdraw. It can be subtle or pronounced, and can (but isn’t always) the cause and result of free riding. Conflict – if not effectively addressed – can leave group members with a deeply jaundiced view of teams.

Strategies: To address both preexisting and potential motivation problems:

• Explain why working in groups is worth the frustration.
• Establish clear expectations for group members, by setting ground rules and/or using team contracts.
• Increase individual accountability by combining group assessments with individual assessments. 
• Teach conflict-resolution skills and reinforce them by role-playing responses to hypothetical team conflict scenarios. 
• Assess group processes via periodic process reports, self-evaluations, and peer evaluations.

Intellectual costs refer to characteristics of group behavior that can reduce creativity and productivity. These include:

• Groupthink : the tendency of groups to conform to a perceived majority view. 
• Escalation of commitment : the tendency of groups to become more committed to their plans and strategies – even ineffective ones – over time. 
• Transparency illusion : the tendency of group members to believe their thoughts, attitudes and reasons are more obvious to others than is actually the case.
• Common information effect : the tendency of groups to focus on information all members share and ignore unique information, however relevant.

Strategies: To reduce intellectual costs and increase the creativity and productivity of groups:

• Precede group brainstorming with a period of individual brainstorming (sometimes called “nominal group technique”). This forestalls groupthink and helps the group generate and consider more different ideas.
• Encourage group members to reflect on and highlight their contributions in periodic self-evaluations. 
• Create structured opportunities at the halfway point of projects to allow students to reevaluate and revise their strategies and approaches.
• Assign roles to group members that reduce conformity and push the group intellectually (devil’s advocate, doubter, the Fool).

Challenges for instructors

While group assignments have benefits for instructors , they also have complexities that instructors should consider carefully, for example in these areas:

Allocating time: While group assignments may save instructors time in some areas (e.g., grading final projects), they may add time in other areas (e.g., time needed up front to identify appropriate project topics, contact external clients, compose student groups; time during the semester to meet with and monitor student groups; time at the end of the semester to ascertain the contributions of individual team members.)

Teaching process skills: Functioning effectively in teams requires students to develop strong communication, coordination, and conflict resolution skills, which not all instructors feel qualified to teach. Many instructors are also reluctant to devote class time to reinforcing these skills and may be uncomfortable dealing with the interpersonal issues that can arise in groups. In other words, dealing proactively with team dynamics may push some instructors out of their comfort zone.

Assessing process as well as product: Assessing teamwork skills and group dynamics (i.e., process) can be far trickier than assessing a team’s work (i.e., product). Effective evaluation of process requires thoughtful consideration of learning objectives and a combination of assessment approaches. This creates layers of complexity that instructors may not anticipate.

Assessing individual as well as group learning: Group grades can hide significant differences in learning, yet teasing out which team members did and did not contribute to the group or learn the lessons of the assignment can be difficult. Once again, this adds complexity to group projects that instructors often underestimate. 

Find effective strategies to help faculty address these issues in the design of effective group projects .

• Tables and Views for SCM

INV_ABC_ASSIGNMENT_GROUPS

INV_ABC_ASSIGNMENT_GROUPS contains information for ABC Groups. Each row in this table defines an ABC Group, and it is populated by the Define ABC Groups form. . Oracle Inventory uses this information as the basis for ABC Class assignment, and item assignment.

Schema: FUSION

Object owner: INV

Object type: TABLE

Tablespace: FUSION_TS_TX_DATA

Primary Key

Foreign keys.

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March 25 Moscow concert hall attack

By Antoinette Radford and Aditi Sangal , CNN

Putin says Moscow attack was carried out by "radical Islamists." But he also blames Ukraine

From CNN's Mariya Knight in Atlanta, Darya Tarasova and Sugam Pokharel in London

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that the brutal attack at a Moscow concert hall on Friday was carried out by “radical Islamists.” 

“We know that the crime was committed by radical Islamists, whose ideology the Islamic world itself has been fighting for centuries,” Putin said.

He also again suggested that Ukraine was to blame for the attack.

“It is also necessary to answer the question why the terrorists tried to go to Ukraine after committing a crime, who was waiting for them there? It is clear that those who support the Kyiv regime do not want to be accomplices of terror and sponsors of terrorism, but there are really a lot of questions,” he said in a meeting via videoconference with government officials, special services and law enforcement agencies on measures taken after the terrorist attack, according to the Kremlin.

“We know by whose hands this atrocity was committed against Russia and its people, and we are interested in who the instigator is,” Putin said.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the massacre and released graphic footage showing the incident – but the Kremlin has alleged, without evidence, that the perpetrators planned to flee to Ukraine. Kyiv has vehemently denied involvement and called the Kremlin’s claims “absurd.”

Putin on Saturday also claimed that a “window” had been prepared for the attackers to escape to Ukraine. He did not provide evidence.

The post has been updated with more details from Putin's remarks.

Death toll in Moscow concert hall attack rises to 139, Russian official says

From CNN’s Dasha Tarasova in London

Two more people have been confirmed dead following a brutal attack at a Moscow concert hall on Friday, taking the death toll to at least 139 killed, a senior Russian official said on Monday.

“Initial results of the investigation indicate that the attack was carefully planned and prepared,” Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the Investigative Committee of Russia, said in a live TV broadcast.

Here's the numbers he provided:

• Deaths: 139 people killed. 137 died on the spot, two died in hospitals.
• Identified: 75 of 139 people have been identified, including three children.
• Cause of death: 40 people died from gunshot wounds, two people died from a combination of gunshot and stab wounds. As a result of the fire, 45 people died from exposure to high temperature and combustion products.

US says that it warned Russia in early March of possible terror attack despite ambassador's denial

From CNN’s Michael Conte 

The US State Department said Monday that the United States had warned Russia in early March about a planned terrorist attack in Moscow “potentially targeting large gatherings, including concerts."

Spokesperson Matthew Miller was responding to a denial by the Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov that Moscow received any warning.

“We gave them that private warning consistent with our duty to warn ... when we see or when we gather intelligence of terrorist attacks or potential terrorist attacks,” Miller said at a press briefing. 

He noted the United States on March 7 warned US citizens to avoid large gatherings in Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had described the security warning as “provocative” and “outright blackmail” before the attack.

“It was because of that warning that we passed on to the Russian government that we issued a security warning on March 7, where we again said to US citizens that we had information about a planned terrorist attack in Moscow… potentially targeting large gatherings including concerts,” Miller added. 

Here's what you need to know about the Moscow concert hall attack that killed 137 people

From CNN staff

All four suspects in the Crocus City concert hall attack case have been remanded into pre-trial detention until May 22. They are charged with committing a terrorist act, according to the courts of general jurisdiction of the city of Moscow, which under the Russian Criminal Code is punishable by up to life imprisonment.

Three of the defendants pled guilty to all charges, according to state media news agency TASS.

All four are from Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic, and had been in Russia on either temporary or expired visas.

On Monday afternoon, authorities said they had identified an additional three people who they believed were involved in the attack — two brothers and a father.

Friday's attack killed at least 137 people. The attack is Russia's deadliest in two decades .

Catch up on the latest developments:

• Day of mourning: Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Sunday a day of national mourning for the 137 victims in Friday's attack .
• Authorities work to identify victims: Procedures to identify those killed in the attack have begun, the city’s Department of Health said, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. The Russian Investigative Committee said 62 bodies had been identified so far, adding that "for the remaining victims, genetic examinations are being carried out to establish their identities."
• Fighting terrorism in Syria and Turkey: Putin held separate calls with his Turkish and Syrian counterparts, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Bashar al-Assad, on Saturday and promised closer cooperation in fighting terrorism following the attack, according to a Kremlin readout.
• Russian Embassy says no warnings from US: The Russian Embassy in Washington says it did not receive any warnings about a potential attack in Moscow from the US. Last week, Putin dismissed warnings by the US embassy in Russia that there could be attacks on large groups.
• Putin links attack to Ukraine: Putin said the main suspects arrested planned to flee into Ukraine. Ukraine has denied any connection. The UK warned that Russia was creating a "smokescreen of propaganda."
• Terror alert: France has lifted its terror alert to its highest level following the deadly attack in Moscow, French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said Sunday.

Russian social media channels show apparent torture of Crocus City suspects

From CNN’s Nathan Hodge

Video footage and still images have appeared on Russian social media that appear to show the violent interrogation of several of the men alleged to have taken part in the deadly terror attack on a concert hall outside Moscow Friday. 

One video appears to show one of the suspects, Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, being held on the ground while having part of his ear cut off by a camouflage-wearing interrogator. Rachabalizoda later appeared in court with a heavily bandaged ear. 

The Grey Zone, a pro-Kremlin Telegram channel, published a still photograph that claims to show the electrocution of one of the detained suspects.

Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Russian state propaganda network RT, posted a video that appears to show the interrogation of another suspect, Shamsidin Fariduni, who is shown stammering and shaking as he is questioned by interrogators off camera. Fariduni subsequently appeared in court with a bruised face. 

CNN asked the Kremlin about the “visible signs of violence” committed against the suspects, but spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declined to comment.  

Russian Investigative Committee asks court to detain three more in connection with concert hall attack

From CNN's Tim Lister and Darya Tarasova

The Russian Investigative Committee says it has established that more people were involved in Friday's Crocus City terror attack beyond the four men alleged to have carried out the attack.

“According to the investigation, in order to commit a terrorist act, Shamsidin Fariduni recruited Aminchon Islomov into the organized group no later than January 2024, and Dilovar Islomov no later than March 11, 2024,” the Investigative Committee said on Telegram. 

The three individuals are two brothers and their father, Russian state media agency TASS said. Investigators are asking the Basmanny Court of Moscow to choose a preventive measure for the three defendants, the court told TASS.

“Three more materials were received regarding the accused Islomov Aminchon Isroilovich, Islomov Dilovar Isroilovich, as well as the suspect Islomov IsroilIbragimovich,” the court said, according to TASS. Fariduni was one of those detained in Bryansk Saturday. Both Aminchon and Dilovar Islomov appeared in Basmanny court in Moscow Monday. State news agency TASS said that Dilovar Islomov is a citizen of the Russian Federation and works as a taxi driver, citing court documents.

Russian state news agency RIA said Dilovar Islomov “owned the Renault car in which the terrorists fled the crime scene, sold it in February, and the compulsory motor liability insurance remained on him,” citing a source familiar with the situation.

Here's what to know about ISIS-K, the group linked to the Moscow concert hall terror attack

From CNN's Jessie Yeung

ISIS, also known as the Islamic State group, claimed responsibility for  Friday’s deadly assault  on a concert venue in Moscow, releasing graphic footage purporting to show its gunmen carrying out what was Russia’s worst terror attack in decades.

Here's what we know about the group:

When was it formed?: ISIS-K was formed in 2015 and has been active in  Afghanistan , Pakistan and Iran. It is a branch of ISIS, the terror group that emerged in Syria and Iraq and, at its peak, controlled a huge stretch of territory. Five years since the  fall of ISIS’ self-proclaimed caliphate  across Iraq and Syria, the group has morphed into a terror network with cells spread around the world, including in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and Southeast Asia.

How is it linked to ISIS? The connection between the groups is not entirely clear. The affiliates share an ideology and tactics, but the depth of their relationship – such as the chain of command and control – has never been fully established.

What is its ideology?: Like its parent organization, ISIS-K aims to create a “pure Islamic state,” according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) – describing the group’s vision of a “global, transnational caliphate” governed by Sharia law.

Why attack Russia?: ISIS has a longstanding animosity against Russia and Putin, several experts told CNN. “Russia has been at the top or near the top of the list of ISIS for many years,” said Daniel Byman, director of Georgetown University’s security studies program.

Read more about  ISIS-K here.

Russians return to site of Moscow terror attack to offer condolences

From CNN's Matthew Chance and Katharina Krebs in Moscow

Four days after Friday's Moscow terror attack, some 200 people gathered at the site of the attack Monday morning, offering condolences to the victims, a CNN team in Moscow reports.

While the crowd was much smaller than the numbers who were at the Crocus City hall on Sunday, a steady flow of people were bringing flowers and stuffed toys to the scene, according to the CNN team. Candles were also laid next to the memorial.

A Russian Red Cross tent is set up at the location to provide psychological help. The CNN team said volunteers are helping people with directions on where to pick up belongings or cars left on Friday. The main entrance of the Crocus hall remains barricaded off, with police buses and emergency vehicles clearing rubble. Search operations are still ongoing.

The victims: Moscow's Department of Health published an updated list of those still hospitalized in the capital's medical institutions after the attack, consisting of 76 names.

At least 137 people died in the attack after gunmen opened fire on people inside the hall, and set fire to the building. Of them, at least three were children. President Vladimir Putin declared Sunday a day of national mourning, vowing to punish the perpetrators and expressing condolences to those who had lost loved ones.

Tajikistan reiterates readiness to cooperate with Russia against terrorism after Moscow concert attack 

From CNN's Anna Chernova

Following the identification of the four men charged with carrying out the attack in Moscow on Friday as Tajik nationals, Tajikistan has reiterated its readiness to fight terrorism together with Russia.

The Russian state news agency TASS published video Monday showing Tajik Prime Minister Kokhir Rasulzoda writing a note in the book of condolences at the Russian embassy in Dushanbe.

State-run RIA Novosti reported on its Telegram channel that Tajikistan is providing assistance to the Russian investigation “in the case of the terrorist attack in Crocus,” citing a source in Tajikistan’s special services. It reported that a source in the Russian Foreign Ministry had confirmed that “Tajikistan specialists are providing assistance to investigators from Russia in connection with the arrest of citizens of the republic in the case of a terrorist attack.”

On Sunday, the Kremlin said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had spoken with his Tajik counterpart Emomali Rahmon, who had expressed “deep condolences and feelings of solidarity with the Russian people in connection with the death of civilians as a result of the vile terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall."

“During the conversation, Vladimir Putin and Emomali Rahmon noted that special services and relevant departments of Russia and Tajikistan are working closely in the field of countering terrorism, and this work will be intensified,” the Kremlin said. 

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