Group assignments unlike individual assignments have totally different dynamics. The participants of a group, in the true sense of democracy do not form a new animal with all legs combined! Usually the nature of the participants ranges from everyone being absolutely careless to everyone in the team being overzealous. The former is very dangerous; however the later is no less dangerous as each participant wanting to enforce his view will result in anarchy. Some groups function very harmoniously by each member of the team taking turns to do the next group project; however the very essence of doing a project in a group is lost in this method! As most of the learning happens through assignments, we have successfully followed the following method of tackling group assignments:
- Choose a leader or one among the group nominates oneself as the leader for that project
- The leader has the responsibility to come up with an overall theme of the project, the table of content and time lines
- Send the theme and table of contents to the group for review
- Group responds with comments by the due date fixed by the leader
- The leader allots the areas of the assignment to the members of the group based on the expertise/interest of the members
- The leader organizes brainstorming sessions to elicit ideas
- The individuals send their contributions to the leader
- Leader stitches together the project report to maintain the uniform flow and sends it for review to the rest of the group.
- The group members respond with any final changes needed
- Leader submits the assignment
Advantages of this method:
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- Development of leadership capabilities; you are leader of people on whom you have no authority but yet are responsible and hence will have to display true leadership
- The other members in the team need not wonder as to who will do the final amalgamation of the project; clear allocation of responsibility
- Every person gets to lead a project or more of his choice
- Everyone participates in the true sense of group assignment
Of course there will angry moments of not getting inputs from group members at times, but that is only a part of the game.
