Group projects are one of the most dreaded kinds of college assignments. Teachers and students alike often admit it is challenging to work collaboratively. Some of the obstacles are: communication, conflicting schedules, delegating tasks and general trust.

But we’ve collected some solid tips on how to get the most out of your group assignment.

The New School Free Press asked group-working professional Gershon Mader, founder and president of corporate consulting firm Quantum Performance Inc, for advice and insights on smooth cooperation in groups. Mader’s company specializes in creating congruity and commitment in organizations, so trust us, this guy knows his stuff. Mader has acted as a management consultant for major companies such as IT megacorporations Cisco, Capital One Bank and the worldwide charity United Way.  

Mader emphasized the difficulties people face when working across functions and groups. He said people often have trouble getting on the same page and becoming aligned in goals and tasks.

“They don’t trust each other 100 percent…they think maybe if they share too much, someone else will get the credit and not them,” Mader said.

Pascal Gatzen, an associate professor of Fashion Design at The New School and founder of the weaving cooperative and Friends of Light, a democratic company with members who all have an equal amount of influence, spoke on the same issue. Gatzen said one of the biggest challenges for a worker’s cooperative she participated in that failed was related to idea protection.

“We have grown up to be individuals in this society that protects our own ideas and our own identities, and both the challenge and also the enormous opportunity of a worker’s cooperative is to share ideas and to collectively own the ideas and move them forward collectively,” said Gatzen.

Katayoun Chamany, New School associate professor of Biology, the chair of the department of natural sciences and math, and director of the university science labs, has her own system for organizing group work. Chamany hopes to teach students how to work in groups, especially students with diverse talents and points of view.

“What I have found is you have to be very careful with group work because not everybody has the same work ethic, and not everyone has the same working style” said Chamany.

Professor Chamany assigns roles to group members, with her knowledge of the individual’s strengths and weaknesses, hoping to encourage equal participation. “That gives people permission to take on roles and be responsible for those roles in a way that might not naturally occur,” she said.

Chamany puts quieter students in a role that would come naturally to them first, like timekeeper role, but then will later assign them the alternative view, whose job is to always play devil’s advocate, coaxing them into expressing themselves more freely, both for their own good and the good of the group. “So I work through a developmental stage with group work, I don’t assume it’s always going to turn out the same all the time,” said Chamany.

Chamney often creates an online discussion for her assigned groups so that quieter or slower processing students have a chance to share their ideas. Mader’s job is to create a similar space when he comes in to advise a business that is having difficulties with collaborative functioning.

“Tensions rise. Conflicts rise. And often, people don’t feel comfortable or safe to have straight conversations…when someone is pissed off about someone else, or frustrated, or disappointed, often we kind of hesitate, or wait…or go around it,” Mader said.

Mader claims that avoiding confrontation often becomes of a company’s obstacles.  “Now, in companies, where a lot of that happens all the time…it begins to weaken and hinder the ability of the company to produce the best results.”

It’s difficult, yet important to create a common space in which everyone feels safe enough to speak honestly. Mader made it clear that his work is not based off of some magic solution no one has thought of before. It’s all “common sense stuff,” said Mader. However, that doesn’t necessarily meant it’s easy. Mader has a system for helping personnel at different levels “put things on the table in a constructive, productive, and effective way. According to Mader, the most important thing when addressing these issues is to be totally honest and really paying attention to each other. “Some issues are a matter of the fact that people just don’t listen each other.”

Listening is especially important to film student to Jeromey Martinez, who often has trouble explaining her very specific tastes. “Even if they have seen my work, they still don’t really get it sometimes, I’m so used to people telling me my stuff is just weird, or that everything I do is weird, or that all my ideas are just weird,” said Martinez.

Monica Magliari, a fashion design major and senior at Parson’s, has gotten better at working independently during her time at The New School. “I think that, you definitely do, as you get older and you have to do it more, and you realize that it’s a fact of life, especially in this industry, that you have to work with multiple people to get things going, that you really have to listen to people and communicate very well. I think that is definitely something that I have learned. It makes working in groups a lot easier if everyone’s on the same page…with as much honesty and being up front.”

Jeremy Brooke, a film professor at the New School who sometimes teaches classes entirely in group projects, believes teaching students to work together is essential because of the inevitability of working in groups in the professional world. “Filmmaking is a cooperative profession, you have to work together, so part of what I’m trying to teach is the necessity of relying on each other.” Group work is required to create any kind of media, said Brooke.

“With the failure, comes the learning…if they have a rougher time because they had to work in a group, they learn the interpersonal skills,” he said.

 

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Illo: Jimmy Ramirez