Making group work work: how to enable successful student collaboration

Developing students’ skills in effective collaboration, particularly as a member of a diverse and interdisciplinary team, is a critical area of interest in higher education. Yet anxieties about group work and team projects are rife, with educators’ workloads often weighed down by complex administrative and organisational tasks. This is alongside the worries of equity of contribution and the risk of non-participation, which require careful managing by teachers.

At LSE100, the flagship interdisciplinary course taken by all first-year undergraduates at LSE, we facilitate a term-long interdisciplinary group research project for more than 1,800 students each academic year. The project requires students to work in multidisciplinary teams and propose a positive change in relation to a complex global challenge – for instance, how can we regulate the development of AI-driven weapons? How can we incentivise the use of green transport in rural areas? How can we tackle educational inequalities between public and private schools? 

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Students bring their own disciplinary expertise to the project, and are expected to work collaboratively with their team to synthesise insights from across the social sciences to deliver a presentation and digital report. With nearly 400 group projects running simultaneously, we’ve devised a range of strategies to support students through the process of collaboration.

Establish a baseline for collaborative success

A first step teams take when embarking on the LSE100 group project is develop a team charter. This activity uses simple prompts to invite students into a conversation with their teammates about their expectations for collaboration. The prompts focus on several areas, including:

• Communication: format, frequency, expectation of response time 
• Team meetings: hybridity, agenda-setting, note-taking 
• Roles and responsibilities: interests, expertise, time frames

All of these encourage students to have a frank and honest dialogue with their team members from the outset of the project. 

In addition to making space for this valuable conversation, a team charter also helps to establish a written record for the group to refer back to. If a group member misses a deadline, acts inappropriately in a meeting or fails to fulfil their responsibilities to their team, both students and teachers can draw on the team charter as an accountability mechanism, using it as a starting point for further conversation and resetting of expectations.

Building confidence in working as a team

All too often, group projects rely solely on students’ existing knowledge or prior experiences of collaboration when considering how students will work together. In LSE100, we have worked to embed a range of team-working skills into students’ preparation for each group project seminar. This is especially important for our first-year undergraduates, many of whom have never been part of a group project before arriving at university. 

During the first half of the project, students learn about techniques for delegating roles in a team, how to build consensus and methods for effective team communication. The second half of the project focuses more concretely on project delivery, developing students’ skills in project management and offering frameworks for conflict resolution in difficult group situations. By foregrounding these elements in our course materials, students are better equipped to collaborate with each other. Instead of relying on their instincts, they can use the evidence-based approaches they’ve encountered in preparing for their seminars.

A scaffolded approach to project delivery

While there is certainly value in group projects that take place entirely outside the classroom, the LSE100 project is designed to maximise students’ engagement with the project during their scheduled seminar time. In group project seminars, students sit with their team members and work through a structured set of tasks or activities which have key project deliverables attached to them. 

For instance, the first seminar asks groups to identify the specific focus of their project through activities that support them in narrowing down their topic and identifying relevant information. Further seminars invite groups to choose a target audience for their project, identify key stakeholders, outline their proposal and pinpoint possible obstacles. 

With each seminar, teams are able to draft a section of their project. This promotes a step-by-step approach and helps groups avoid feeling overwhelmed when the project deadline nears. Scaffolding groups’ work in this way also lets teachers take on an important supervisory role, checking in with teams about their progress and identifying any sticking points where individual students or groups may be struggling.

Designing structured seminars for group project work also enables the inclusion of meaningful peer feedback opportunities. During LSE100 seminars, groups regularly meet each other to hear about their projects, act as “critical friends” and test out new ideas with their peers before finalising them for submission. Giving groups the opportunity to learn about each other’s work-in-progress, rather than solely the final product, incentivises collaboration and sharing of perspectives which can be hugely valuable for student teams.

While team working can often raise new and unexpected challenges for both students and educators, our approaches have helped ensure that LSE100 students are able to make meaningful progress and work effectively as part of a diverse and interdisciplinary team. Feedback from students indicates that the group project is often their favourite part of their LSE100 experience, helping them develop essential skills for their future studies and beyond.

Jillian Terry is associate professor (education) and co-director of LSE100 at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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