This post will conclude my series on learning styles. This particular learning style has been all the rage for quite a while. Learning by collaboration makes up a great deal of the learning experiences for especially high school and college level work. Group projects have come to be the norm and are seen as providing a rich learning experience for all involved.
I Hate Group Projects
Like every other learning style I have covered in this series, it remains that some people learn well using this learning style and some do not. Mention a group project in my presence, and you will probably get a very nasty look. I HATE group projects with a passion. I had to do at least one if not many more group projects every semester while getting my technical certificate in early childhood, my bachelor's degree and quite a few semesters of my master's degree. I would personally rather write a 10 page paper than have to do a group project. However, I survived many of them, but how I survived speaks a great deal to how effective this particular learning style actually is for many people.
A Level Playing Field
The effectiveness of group learning situations depends greatly on the levelness of the playing field. What I mean by this is how equally yoked are the members of the group. When a group has a fairly even level of skill, that group will be a higher functioning group than when the level of skill is varied. This is true of learning groups as well as business groups. The group project idea actually originated in the business world and has trickled down into the educational world. The business world is beginning to realize that all groups are not created equal. It used to be thought that groups will produce better results than individuals working by themselves. However, many studies have shown that does not necessarily play out in reality. The old adage that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link very much applies to groups. Only when each member is equally strong in his/her area of expertise will a group produce a result greater than what each individual could produce on his/her own. In the business world, this is called a high-functioning group. When the members of the group are unequally yoked, what results is compensation rather than collaboration. The stronger members of the group have to compensate for the lack of skills present in the weaker members, and therefore, the end result becomes the product of the overworked stronger members of the group. Overworked members rarely produce their best results. This is why I hate group projects. In all the group projects I have ever been assigned only a very few were in groups where I was not either the strongest academic member or one of a few strong academic members. In the few where I was equally yoked, those projects were impressive. We were actually able to pool the talents of all members to produce a greater result than any one of us could have produced alone. In all the others they might as well have been my projects because I either did all the work or reworked all the work to bring it up to the caliber that I knew was required, and none of those could fall into the category of my best work.
Results vs. Process
Not everyone feels the same about group projects as I do. However, that is also for various and assorted reasons. Some people like group projects because they know there will be a me in the group to do all the work, and therefore, they will get an easy "A." Some people enjoy the social aspects of working together and are not as concerned about the end results. For those people it is more about the process than the results. However, let just one member be a results person and everyone is miserable. I guess I am the results person, and prove my point about being equally yoked. All members of the group need to be either results oriented or process oriented. Mixing the two makes everyone miserable.
The Process People
People do exist that seem to thrive in the group setting. They learn and grow more from each other than they would when working alone. Process of learning typically falls higher in their priorities than results. For them the experience embodies the learning process rather than the acquisition of knowledge. I am not one of those people, but if you have read many books on early childhood learning, you will recognize that many of those writers are those type of people. However, not all children learn the same just like not all adults learn the same. Some children thrive in a process environment and some children get aggravated in a process learning environment. I would have been one of the aggravated. Give me substance, please.
Being Unequally Yoked
How does all of this translate into the early childhood world? Many curriculums and books on early childhood learning are based on social learning. It is very important to understand that not all children learn this way. Teaching young children sometimes is like a crap shoot. You have to try different methods until you find the one that works for the group of children in your care. If the children in your care are very unequally yoked, you may have to scrap a lot of social learning or only use it occasionally. I do have that situation in my very small childcare. I use a wide variety of activities to meet the needs of the widely ranging skill level of the children in my care. Group learning situations at my childcare often end up in a war of some sort. I have had to learn to individualize the group activities in order to get the same level of participation from all the children. Otherwise, one or two children participates and the others act up. I know that represents a great deal of what goes on in childcares all over the country. Many providers do not understand the unequally yoked factor of group activities and group settings. The business world has finally realized the importance of high functioning groups. Maybe the educational world will get there sometime in the next century.
I hope you have enjoyed this post. Goodbye and God bless!!
Check out Natalie's children's books at: https://www.amazon.com/author/nataliewade7457
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