Group work has a habit of dividing opinion. Mention it in a staff meeting and it is not long before stories emerge about free riders, difficult team dynamics, assessment headaches and students who would much rather work alone. Yet despite these challenges, group work remains one of the most powerful ways students can learn, not just from us as educators, but from each other. That was the spirit behind the SLOWposium provocation session.
Opening the conversation, Professor Lewis Bizo, Executive Dean, reflected on his work at the University of Southampton embedding transferable skills, teamwork and group assessment into the curriculum. Coming from a research background in animal learning, this challenged him to explore the literature on teaching and pedagogy well beyond his own discipline. His research with colleagues reinforced a practical lesson: if we expect students to work well together, we need to help them learn how to do that constructively, to learn how to negotiate, accommodate differing viewpoints and ways of working, and how to manage conflict and disagreement.
Some of his strongest memories were of students’ reflections on the experience. These brought home how anxious people can feel in groups, how guarded they can be about their work and grades, and how lonely university life can sometimes be. For some students, group work helped them make friends and find people to talk to and learn with. Helping students work together therefore has value that extends into their lives and careers, while requiring us to take concerns about fairness and participation seriously.
Lewis connected this with his work as a teacher and leader, and his commitment to building a culture of collaboration, collegiality and mutual respect. He described himself as “a facilitator, a cultivator of people”, with his greatest sense of achievement coming from helping others grow and flourish. This framed the session’s central question: What does assessment look like when learning together is the goal, not a problem to manage?
What stood out most in the session were not the assessment designs or curriculum models, but the human stories. These ideas were echoed through the diverse experiences shared by the speakers.
Dr Felicity Small explored how students collaborate on real client projects in Switzerland. Felicity shared that she ultimately “… wanted staff to recognise that group projects have both enablers and detractors, and that the learning environment and the mindsets students bring to an assessment influence how effectively they work together. My central message was about shifting students’ focus from individual achievement towards collective success: helping their group work together to produce the best possible assignment.”
“An important enabler in our project was the relationship with an external industry client. This gave students a shared purpose beyond their marks. They were responding to a client’s needs and representing their institution, which encouraged them to consider their responsibility to the group and the quality of its collective contribution.” She continued.
Felicity goes on to say, “I also wanted to acknowledge that we cannot eliminate every challenge in group work. We can, however, reduce barriers and find ways to turn differences into opportunities. In our project, students’ different backgrounds and skills sometimes made collaboration difficult. Breaking the project into activities and allowing students to choose where they could contribute gave them agency and helped them recognise the value of their strengths. Bringing these contributions together helped make progress visible, build trust and create opportunities to learn from one another.”
Dr Arnela Ceric reflected on what students value about learning with one another in an era increasingly shaped by AI. She shared a thoughtful reflection on helping students get the most from group work by making the often-unspoken aspects of collaboration visible. By openly discussing group dynamics, common challenges and team expectations, she encouraged students to take ownership of how they worked together. Arnela also explored students’ experiences of using AI as a thinking partner. While many found it valuable for generating ideas and expanding their thinking, they also recognised that some of the richest learning still came from discussing, questioning and making sense of those ideas together. Her presentation left us with a compelling question: how do we preserve the human value of collaboration in a world where students are increasingly learning with AI as well as from each other?
Professor Branka Krivokapic-Skoko and Dr Nicola Thomas considered the human experience of learning about economic and social equality through diverse student groups. Branka and Nicola are redesigning learning in economics with the intention to highlight ‘human’ aspect of the group work, focusing on the process not outcomes. They talked about setting up diverse groups of students and how working in groups helped some students with mental health issues, relieved anxiety and changed the energy of the class.
Associate Professor Mark Frost and Emmett Berry discussed how group work can build confidence and communication skills. According to Mark, “My participation in the Slowposium had some selfish intentions. In some ways it wasn’t about wanting to give something to the audience, but more about getting some ideas from the audience and other presentations. Over many sessions as convenor and class teacher in China I have found group work dominated by time constraints, large class numbers, and a cramped schedule such that the opportunity to storm, form and norm groups was limited. Furthermore, how can we enhance the culturally collectivist dimension of Chinese students from both family backgrounds and campus experience to leverage student outcomes and experiences. That is, moving from a largely task driven exercise to a genuine learning opportunity. How can we do this better such that it moves from something we must do to something we want to do, that has both assessment benefits as well as professional development benefits.”
Dr Linda Peach and Dr Nicole Sugden shared insights from embedding effective group work practices in Psychology. Together, their stories painted a picture of group work as something far richer than a strategy for assessment. “In setting up our group/team task in psychology, I felt a lot of apprehension from staff, who were apprehensive around student perceptions/satisfaction with such a task. I have previously had conversations with staff who have told me: “We do not do group tasks in psychology”, with concerns around student competitiveness, previous experiences of harassment among students at other universities, and concerns around the logistics with large classes. In our presentation/provocation, I wanted to demonstrate that with the right support, technology, and attitudes towards team tasks that it is very doable, and at a large scale.” Nicole explains.
Nicole concludes, “I thought Lewis raised a really good point around not attaching marks to group/team assessments and using satisfactory/unsatisfactory grading system instead. In psychology, we already do this in our postgraduate subjects a lot where we are assessing competencies. Given that teamwork is a competency we are assessing in undergrad now, this might be something we should be implementing. I feel that this would circumnavigate a lot of the issues around competitiveness (if you are just being marked as satisfactory and not fighting for the highest grade), sabotage (what’s the point of sabotaging if you are not competing), and being able to assess the competency in an authentic way.”
Perhaps that is the invitation for all of us as educators. Instead of seeing group work primarily as a logistical challenge to be managed, we might view it as an opportunity to help students learn one of life’s most important skills: how to work, learn and grow alongside other people. When we do that, group work becomes less about dividing tasks and more about building relationships, confidence, belonging and genuine learning.
Our speakers have kindly shared their presentation slides below:
