group work project essay

How to write a Reflection on Group Work Essay

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Here are the exact steps you need to follow for a reflection on group work essay.

• Explain what Reflection Is
• Explore the benefits of group work
• Explore the challenges group
• Give examples of the benefits and challenges your group faced
• Discuss how your group handled your challenges
• Discuss what you will do differently next time

Do you have to reflect on how your group work project went?

This is a super common essay that teachers assign. So, let’s have a look at how you can go about writing a superb reflection on your group work project that should get great grades.

The essay structure I outline below takes the funnel approach to essay writing: it starts broad and general, then zooms in on your specific group’s situation.

Disclaimer: Make sure you check with your teacher to see if this is a good style to use for your essay. Take a draft to your teacher to get their feedback on whether it’s what they’re looking for!

This is a 6-step essay (the 7 th step is editing!). Here’s a general rule for how much depth to go into depending on your word count:

• 1500 word essay – one paragraph for each step, plus a paragraph each for the introduction and conclusion ;
• 3000 word essay – two paragraphs for each step, plus a paragraph each for the introduction and conclusion;
• 300 – 500 word essay – one or two sentences for each step.

Adjust this essay plan depending on your teacher’s requirements and remember to always ask your teacher, a classmate or a professional tutor to review the piece before submitting.

Here’s the steps I’ll outline for you in this advice article:

Step 1. Explain what ‘Reflection’ Is

You might have heard that you need to define your terms in essays. Well, the most important term in this essay is ‘reflection’.

So, let’s have a look at what reflection is…

Reflection is the process of:

• Pausing and looking back at what has just happened; then
• Thinking about how you can get better next time.

Reflection is encouraged in most professions because it’s believed that reflection helps you to become better at your job – we could say ‘reflection makes you a better practitioner’.

Think about it: let’s say you did a speech in front of a crowd. Then, you looked at video footage of that speech and realised you said ‘um’ and ‘ah’ too many times. Next time, you’re going to focus on not saying ‘um’ so that you’ll do a better job next time, right?

Well, that’s reflection: thinking about what happened and how you can do better next time.

It’s really important that you do both of the above two points in your essay. You can’t just say what happened. You need to say how you will do better next time in order to get a top grade on this group work reflection essay.

Scholarly Sources to Cite for Step 1

Okay, so you have a good general idea of what reflection is. Now, what scholarly sources should you use when explaining reflection? Below, I’m going to give you two basic sources that would usually be enough for an undergraduate essay. I’ll also suggest two more sources for further reading if you really want to shine!

I recommend these two sources to cite when explaining what reflective practice is and how it occurs. They are two of the central sources on reflective practice:

• Describe what happened during the group work process
• Explain how you felt during the group work process
• Look at the good and bad aspects of the group work process
• What were some of the things that got in the way of success? What were some things that helped you succeed?
• What could you have done differently to improve the situation?
• Action plan. What are you going to do next time to make the group work process better?
• What? Explain what happened
• So What? Explain what you learned
• Now What? What can I do next time to make the group work process better?

Possible Sources:

Bassot, B. (2015).  The reflective practice guide: An interdisciplinary approach to critical reflection . Routledge.

Brock, A. (2014). What is reflection and reflective practice?. In  The Early Years Reflective Practice Handbook  (pp. 25-39). Routledge.

Gibbs, G. (1988)  Learning by Doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods . Further Education Unit, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford.

Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D., Jasper, M. (2001). Critical reflection in nursing and the helping professions: a user’s guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Extension Sources for Top Students

Now, if you want to go deeper and really show off your knowledge, have a look at these two scholars:

• John Dewey – the first major scholar to come up with the idea of reflective practice
• Donald Schön – technical rationality, reflection in action vs. reflection on action

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Step 2. Explore the general benefits of group work for learning

Once you have given an explanation of what group work is (and hopefully cited Gibbs, Rolfe, Dewey or Schon), I recommend digging into the benefits of group work for your own learning.

The teacher gave you a group work task for a reason: what is that reason?

You’ll need to explain the reasons group work is beneficial for you. This will show your teacher that you understand what group work is supposed to achieve. Here’s some ideas:

• Multiple Perspectives. Group work helps you to see things from other people’s perspectives. If you did the task on your own, you might not have thought of some of the ideas that your team members contributed to the project.
• Contribution of Unique Skills. Each team member might have a different set of skills they can bring to the table. You can explain how groups can make the most of different team members’ strengths to make the final contribution as good as it can be. For example, one team member might be good at IT and might be able to put together a strong final presentation, while another member might be a pro at researching using google scholar so they got the task of doing the initial scholarly research.
• Improved Communication Skills. Group work projects help you to work on your communication skills. Communication skills required in group work projects include speaking in turn, speaking up when you have ideas, actively listening to other team members’ contributions, and crucially making compromises for the good of the team.
• Learn to Manage Workplace Conflict. Lastly, your teachers often assign you group work tasks so you can learn to manage conflict and disagreement. You’ll come across this a whole lot in the workplace, so your teachers want you to have some experience being professional while handling disagreements.

You might be able to add more ideas to this list, or you might just want to select one or two from that list to write about depending on the length requirements for the essay.

Scholarly Sources for Step 3

Make sure you provide citations for these points above. You might want to use google scholar or google books and type in ‘Benefits of group work’ to find some quality scholarly sources to cite.

Step 3. Explore the general challenges group work can cause

Step 3 is the mirror image of Step 2. For this step, explore the challenges posed by group work.

Students are usually pretty good at this step because you can usually think of some aspects of group work that made you anxious or frustrated. Here are a few common challenges that group work causes:

• Time Consuming. You need to organize meetups and often can’t move onto the next component of the project until everyone has agree to move on. When working on your own you can just crack on and get it done. So, team work often takes a lot of time and requires significant pre-planning so you don’t miss your submission deadlines!
• Learning Style Conflicts. Different people learn in different ways. Some of us like to get everything done at the last minute or are not very meticulous in our writing. Others of us are very organized and detailed and get anxious when things don’t go exactly how we expect. This leads to conflict and frustration in a group work setting.
• Free Loaders. Usually in a group work project there’s people who do more work than others. The issue of free loaders is always going to be a challenge in group work, and you can discuss in this section how ensuring individual accountability to the group is a common group work issue.
• Communication Breakdown. This is one especially for online students. It’s often the case that you email team members your ideas or to ask them to reply by a deadline and you don’t hear back from them. Regular communication is an important part of group work, yet sometimes your team members will let you down on this part.

As with Step 3, consider adding more points to this list if you need to, or selecting one or two if your essay is only a short one.

8 Pros And Cons Of Group Work At University

You’ll probably find you can cite the same scholarly sources for both steps 2 and 3 because if a source discusses the benefits of group work it’ll probably also discuss the challenges.

Step 4. Explore the specific benefits and challenges your group faced

Step 4 is where you zoom in on your group’s specific challenges. Have a think: what were the issues you really struggled with as a group?

• Was one team member absent for a few of the group meetings?
• Did the group have to change some deadlines due to lack of time?
• Were there any specific disagreements you had to work through?
• Did a group member drop out of the group part way through?
• Were there any communication break downs?

Feel free to also mention some things your group did really well. Have a think about these examples:

• Was one member of the group really good at organizing you all?
• Did you make some good professional relationships?
• Did a group member help you to see something from an entirely new perspective?
• Did working in a group help you to feel like you weren’t lost and alone in the process of completing the group work component of your course?

Here, because you’re talking about your own perspectives, it’s usually okay to use first person language (but check with your teacher). You are also talking about your own point of view so citations might not be quite as necessary, but it’s still a good idea to add in one or two citations – perhaps to the sources you cited in Steps 2 and 3?

Step 5. Discuss how your group managed your challenges

Step 5 is where you can explore how you worked to overcome some of the challenges you mentioned in Step 4.

So, have a think:

• Did your group make any changes part way through the project to address some challenges you faced?
• Did you set roles or delegate tasks to help ensure the group work process went smoothly?
• Did you contact your teacher at any point for advice on how to progress in the group work scenario?
• Did you use technology such as Google Docs or Facebook Messenger to help you to collaborate more effectively as a team?

In this step, you should be showing how your team was proactive in reflecting on your group work progress and making changes throughout the process to ensure it ran as smoothly as possible. This act of making little changes throughout the group work process is what’s called ‘Reflection in Action’ (Schön, 2017).

Scholarly Source for Step 5

Schön, D. A. (2017).  The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action . Routledge.

Step 6. Conclude by exploring what you will do differently next time

Step 6 is the most important step, and the one far too many students skip. For Step 6, you need to show how you not only reflected on what happened but also are able to use that reflection for personal growth into the future.

This is the heart and soul of your piece: here, you’re tying everything together and showing why reflection is so important!

This is the ‘action plan’ step in Gibbs’ cycle (you might want to cite Gibbs in this section!).

For Step 6, make some suggestions about how (based on your reflection) you now have some takeaway tips that you’ll bring forward to improve your group work skills next time. Here’s some ideas:

• Will you work harder next time to set deadlines in advance?
• Will you ensure you set clearer group roles next time to ensure the process runs more smoothly?
• Will you use a different type of technology (such as Google Docs) to ensure group communication goes more smoothly?
• Will you make sure you ask for help from your teacher earlier on in the process when you face challenges?
• Will you try harder to see things from everyone’s perspectives so there’s less conflict?

This step will be personalized based upon your own group work challenges and how you felt about the group work process. Even if you think your group worked really well together, I recommend you still come up with one or two ideas for continual improvement. Your teacher will want to see that you used reflection to strive for continual self-improvement.

Scholarly Source for Step 6

Step 7. edit.

Okay, you’ve got the nuts and bolts of the assessment put together now! Next, all you’ve got to do is write up the introduction and conclusion then edit the piece to make sure you keep growing your grades.

Here’s a few important suggestions for this last point:

• You should always write your introduction and conclusion last. They will be easier to write now that you’ve completed the main ‘body’ of the essay;
• Use my 5-step I.N.T.R.O method to write your introduction;
• Use my 5 C’s Conclusion method to write your conclusion;
• Use my 5 tips for editing an essay to edit it;
• Use the ProWritingAid app to get advice on how to improve your grammar and spelling. Make sure to also use the report on sentence length. It finds sentences that are too long and gives you advice on how to shorten them – such a good strategy for improving evaluative essay  quality!
• Make sure you contact your teacher and ask for a one-to-one tutorial to go through the piece before submitting. This article only gives general advice, and you might need to make changes based upon the specific essay requirements that your teacher has provided.

That’s it! 7 steps to writing a quality group work reflection essay. I hope you found it useful. If you liked this post and want more clear and specific advice on writing great essays, I recommend signing up to my personal tutor mailing list.

Let’s sum up with those 7 steps one last time:

• Explain what ‘Reflection’ Is
• Explore the benefits of group work for learning
• Explore the challenges of group work for learning
• Explore the specific benefits and challenges your group faced
• Discuss how your group managed your challenges
• Conclude by exploring what you will do differently next time

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 25 Number Games for Kids (Free and Easy)
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 25 Word Games for Kids (Free and Easy)
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 25 Outdoor Games for Kids
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 50 Incentives to Give to Students

2 thoughts on “How to write a Reflection on Group Work Essay”

Great instructions on writing a reflection essay. I would not change anything.

Thanks so much for your feedback! I really appreciate it. – Chris.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Teamwork — Reflection Paper on Group Work

Reflection Paper on Group Work

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Published: Mar 20, 2024

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Reflection of Group Project, Essay Example

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Summary of Peer Feedback

Peer feedback has been one of the most valuable learning experience in this project because it has helped our group understand our strengths and weaknesses we were unaware of and has provided valuable suggestions regarding improvement in the future.The peer feedback gives us a good summary of our presentation. First of all, the presentation was more focused on oral presentation. The presenters also made sure to involve the audience in the discussion. The presenters also succeeded in relaying the central message of their presentation.

Group Strengths

The project strength noted by most of the audience members was the presenters’ attempt to involve the audience whether through class activity or discussion. This ensured that the audience is engaged with the discussion and better grasp the concepts being relayed by the presenters. This approach also ensured that audience do not get bored and stay engaged. The presenters also appeared knowledgeable about their material which helped them build credibility with the audience.

Groups Weaknesses

Some of the audience members felt the presentation could use more multi-media and visual materials. This feedback made us realized that people have different learning styles and oral delivery of information may not be suited to everyone. Similarly, some pointed out that presentation slides could have used more information which once again confirm that we made the error of assuming oral delivery of information will be sufficient to help audience understand the message.In fact, some peers pointed out we could have used less talking because it becomes challenging to retain information. Another weakness of the presentation was lack of simple examples. We mistakenly assumed that the audience member will already have reasonable understanding of the material we may be presenting, thus, we chose the examples our group understood. This feedback make us realized that the best strategy is to use the simplest examples so that even those with poor understanding of theories can grasp the message.

Strategy for Improvement in the Future

After going through peer feedback, our group also evaluated the actual processes we went through in completing the project and determined what may and may not be the desirable strategy in the future. In our opinion, one of the strongest qualities of our group was that each member displayed professionalism regarding his/her tasks and completed them on time and in a manner expected of him/her. This helped us complete project before time and gave us valuable time to prepare for presentation. This sense of reliability also built strong working relationship among the members. The main weakness of our group was insufficient face-to-face meetings which were also due to time constraints. Thus, most of the communication took place through email until we prepared for the presentation. After our group went through peer feedback, we realized lack of face-to-face meeting prevented us from valuable brainstorming opportunities which might have helped us address some of the weaknesses noted in the feedback.

In future, we will hold more face-to-face meetings even if they are short or during lunch breaks. We will also incorporate more multi-media material and achieve a delicate balance in terms of written material. Some peer members appreciated while others complained about lack of written material, thus, the answer lies somewhere in between. We will also incorporate more examples and the criteria to choose examples would be that they can be understood by even those who are being introduced to the concept/theory for the first time.

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My Experience Working in a Group: a Reflection

Table of contents, challenges of group work, benefits and learning opportunities, lessons learned.

• Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (2009). An educational psychology success story: Social interdependence theory and cooperative learning. Educational researcher, 38(5), 365-379.
• Belbin, R. M. (2012). Team roles at work. Taylor & Francis.
• Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384-399.
• Forsyth, D. R. (2014). Group dynamics (6th ed.). Cengage Learning.
• Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (2015). The wisdom of teams: Creating the high-performance organization. Harvard Business Review Press.

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Group Writing

What this handout is about.

Whether in the academic world or the business world, all of us are likely to participate in some form of group writing—an undergraduate group project for a class, a collaborative research paper or grant proposal, or a report produced by a business team. Writing in a group can have many benefits: multiple brains are better than one, both for generating ideas and for getting a job done. However, working in a group can sometimes be stressful because there are various opinions and writing styles to incorporate into one final product that pleases everyone. This handout will offer an overview of the collaborative process, strategies for writing successfully together, and tips for avoiding common pitfalls. It will also include links to some other handouts that may be especially helpful as your group moves through the writing process.

Disclaimer and disclosure

As this is a group writing handout, several Writing Center coaches worked together to create it. No coaches were harmed in this process; however, we did experience both the pros and the cons of the collaborative process. We have personally tested the various methods for sharing files and scheduling meetings that are described here. However, these are only our suggestions; we do not advocate any particular service or site.

The spectrum of collaboration in group writing

All writing can be considered collaborative in a sense, though we often don’t think of it that way. It would be truly surprising to find an author whose writing, even if it was completed independently, had not been influenced at some point by discussions with friends or colleagues. The range of possible collaboration varies from a group of co-authors who go through each portion of the writing process together, writing as a group with one voice, to a group with a primary author who does the majority of the work and then receives comments or edits from the co-authors.

Group projects for classes should usually fall towards the middle to left side of this diagram, with group members contributing roughly equally. However, in collaborations on research projects, the level of involvement of the various group members may vary widely. The key to success in either case is to be clear about group member responsibilities and expectations and to give credit (authorship) to members who contribute an appropriate amount. It may be useful to credit each group member for their various contributions.

Overview of steps of the collaborative process

Here we outline the steps of the collaborative process. You can use these questions to focus your thinking at each stage.

• Share ideas and brainstorm together.
• Formulate a draft thesis or argument .
• Think about your assignment and the final product. What should it look like? What is its purpose? Who is the intended audience ?
• Decide together who will write which parts of the paper/project.
• What will the final product look like?
• Arrange meetings: How often will the group or subsets of the group meet? When and where will the group meet? If the group doesn’t meet in person, how will information be shared?
• Scheduling: What is the deadline for the final product? What are the deadlines for drafts?
• How will the group find appropriate sources (books, journal articles, newspaper articles, visual media, trustworthy websites, interviews)? If the group will be creating data by conducting research, how will that process work?
• Who will read and process the information found? This task again may be done by all members or divided up amongst members so that each person becomes the expert in one area and then teaches the rest of the group.
• Think critically about the sources and their contributions to your topic. Which evidence should you include or exclude? Do you need more sources?
• Analyze the data. How will you interpret your findings? What is the best way to present any relevant information to your readers-should you include pictures, graphs, tables, and charts, or just written text?
• Note that brainstorming the main points of your paper as a group is helpful, even if separate parts of the writing are assigned to individuals. You’ll want to be sure that everyone agrees on the central ideas.
• Where does your individual writing fit into the whole document?
• Writing together may not be feasible for longer assignments or papers with coauthors at different universities, and it can be time-consuming. However, writing together does ensure that the finished document has one cohesive voice.
• Talk about how the writing session should go BEFORE you get started. What goals do you have? How will you approach the writing task at hand?
• Many people find it helpful to get all of the ideas down on paper in a rough form before discussing exact phrasing.
• Remember that everyone has a different writing style! The most important thing is that your sentences be clear to readers.
• If your group has drafted parts of the document separately, merge your ideas together into a single document first, then focus on meshing the styles. The first concern is to create a coherent product with a logical flow of ideas. Then the stylistic differences of the individual portions must be smoothed over.
• Revise the ideas and structure of the paper before worrying about smaller, sentence-level errors (like problems with punctuation, grammar, or word choice). Is the argument clear? Is the evidence presented in a logical order? Do the transitions connect the ideas effectively?
• Proofreading: Check for typos, spelling errors, punctuation problems, formatting issues, and grammatical mistakes. Reading the paper aloud is a very helpful strategy at this point.

Helpful collaborative writing strategies

Attitude counts for a lot.

Group work can be challenging at times, but a little enthusiasm can go a long way to helping the momentum of the group. Keep in mind that working in a group provides a unique opportunity to see how other people write; as you learn about their writing processes and strategies, you can reflect on your own. Working in a group inherently involves some level of negotiation, which will also facilitate your ability to skillfully work with others in the future.

Remember that respect goes along way! Group members will bring different skill sets and various amounts and types of background knowledge to the table. Show your fellow writers respect by listening carefully, talking to share your ideas, showing up on time for meetings, sending out drafts on schedule, providing positive feedback, and taking responsibility for an appropriate share of the work.

Start early and allow plenty of time for revising

Getting started early is important in individual projects; however, it is absolutely essential in group work. Because of the multiple people involved in researching and writing the paper, there are aspects of group projects that take additional time, such as deciding and agreeing upon a topic. Group projects should be approached in a structured way because there is simply less scheduling flexibility than when you are working alone. The final product should reflect a unified, cohesive voice and argument, and the only way of accomplishing this is by producing multiple drafts and revising them multiple times.

Plan a strategy for scheduling

One of the difficult aspects of collaborative writing is finding times when everyone can meet. Much of the group’s work may be completed individually, but face-to-face meetings are useful for ensuring that everyone is on the same page. Doodle.com , whenisgood.net , and needtomeet.com are free websites that can make scheduling easier. Using these sites, an organizer suggests multiple dates and times for a meeting, and then each group member can indicate whether they are able to meet at the specified times.

It is very important to set deadlines for drafts; people are busy, and not everyone will have time to read and respond at the last minute. It may help to assign a group facilitator who can send out reminders of the deadlines. If the writing is for a co-authored research paper, the lead author can take responsibility for reminding others that comments on a given draft are due by a specific date.

Submitting drafts at least one day ahead of the meeting allows other authors the opportunity to read over them before the meeting and arrive ready for a productive discussion.

Find a convenient and effective way to share files

There are many different ways to share drafts, research materials, and other files. Here we describe a few of the potential options we have explored and found to be functional. We do not advocate any one option, and we realize there are other equally useful options—this list is just a possible starting point for you:

• Email attachments. People often share files by email; however, especially when there are many group members or there is a flurry of writing activity, this can lead to a deluge of emails in everyone’s inboxes and significant confusion about which file version is current.
• Google documents . Files can be shared between group members and are instantaneously updated, even if two members are working at once. Changes made by one member will automatically appear on the document seen by all members. However, to use this option, every group member must have a Gmail account (which is free), and there are often formatting issues when converting Google documents back to Microsoft Word.
• Dropbox . Dropbox.com is free to join. It allows you to share up to 2GB of files, which can then be synched and accessible from multiple computers. The downside of this approach is that everyone has to join, and someone must install the software on at least one personal computer. Dropbox can then be accessed from any computer online by logging onto the website.
• Common server space. If all group members have access to a shared server space, this is often an ideal solution. Members of a lab group or a lab course with available server space typically have these resources. Just be sure to make a folder for your project and clearly label your files.

Note that even when you are sharing or storing files for group writing projects in a common location, it is still essential to periodically make back-up copies and store them on your own computer! It is never fun to lose your (or your group’s) hard work.

Try separating the tasks of revising and editing/proofreading

It may be helpful to assign giving feedback on specific items to particular group members. First, group members should provide general feedback and comments on content. Only after revising and solidifying the main ideas and structure of the paper should you move on to editing and proofreading. After all, there is no point in spending your time making a certain sentence as beautiful and correct as possible when that sentence may later be cut out. When completing your final revisions, it may be helpful to assign various concerns (for example, grammar, organization, flow, transitions, and format) to individual group members to focus this process. This is an excellent time to let group members play to their strengths; if you know that you are good at transitions, offer to take care of that editing task.

Your group project is an opportunity to become experts on your topic. Go to the library (in actuality or online), collect relevant books, articles, and data sources, and consult a reference librarian if you have any issues. Talk to your professor or TA early in the process to ensure that the group is on the right track. Find experts in the field to interview if it is appropriate. If you have data to analyze, meet with a statistician. If you are having issues with the writing, use the online handouts at the Writing Center or come in for a face-to-face meeting: a coach can meet with you as a group or one-on-one.

Immediately dividing the writing into pieces

While this may initially seem to be the best way to approach a group writing process, it can also generate more work later on, when the parts written separately must be put together into a unified document. The different pieces must first be edited to generate a logical flow of ideas, without repetition. Once the pieces have been stuck together, the entire paper must be edited to eliminate differences in style and any inconsistencies between the individual authors’ various chunks. Thus, while it may take more time up-front to write together, in the end a closer collaboration can save you from the difficulties of combining pieces of writing and may create a stronger, more cohesive document.

Procrastination

Although this is solid advice for any project, it is even more essential to start working on group projects in a timely manner. In group writing, there are more people to help with the work-but there are also multiple schedules to juggle and more opinions to seek.

Being a solo group member

Not everyone enjoys working in groups. You may truly desire to go solo on this project, and you may even be capable of doing a great job on your own. However, if this is a group assignment, then the prompt is asking for everyone to participate. If you are feeling the need to take over everything, try discussing expectations with your fellow group members as well as the teaching assistant or professor. However, always address your concerns with group members first. Try to approach the group project as a learning experiment: you are learning not only about the project material but also about how to motivate others and work together.

Waiting for other group members to do all of the work

If this is a project for a class, you are leaving your grade in the control of others. Leaving the work to everyone else is not fair to your group mates. And in the end, if you do not contribute, then you are taking credit for work that you did not do; this is a form of academic dishonesty. To ensure that you can do your share, try to volunteer early for a portion of the work that you are interested in or feel you can manage.

Leaving all the end work to one person

It may be tempting to leave all merging, editing, and/or presentation work to one person. Be careful. There are several reasons why this may be ill-advised. 1) The editor/presenter may not completely understand every idea, sentence, or word that another author wrote, leading to ambiguity or even mistakes in the end paper or presentation. 2) Editing is tough, time-consuming work. The editor often finds himself or herself doing more work than was expected as they try to decipher and merge the original contributions under the time pressure of an approaching deadline. If you decide to follow this path and have one person combine the separate writings of many people, be sure to leave plenty of time for a final review by all of the writers. Ask the editor to send out the final draft of the completed work to each of the authors and let every contributor review and respond to the final product. Ideally, there should also be a test run of any live presentations that the group or a representative may make.

Entirely negative critiques

When giving feedback or commenting on the work of other group members, focusing only on “problems” can be overwhelming and put your colleagues on the defensive. Try to highlight the positive parts of the project in addition to pointing out things that need work. Remember that this is constructive feedback, so don’t forget to add concrete, specific suggestions on how to proceed. It can also be helpful to remind yourself that many of your comments are your own opinions or reactions, not absolute, unquestionable truths, and then phrase what you say accordingly. It is much easier and more helpful to hear “I had trouble understanding this paragraph because I couldn’t see how it tied back to our main argument” than to hear “this paragraph is unclear and irrelevant.”

Writing in a group can be challenging, but it is also a wonderful opportunity to learn about your topic, the writing process, and the best strategies for collaboration. We hope that our tips will help you and your group members have a great experience.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Cross, Geoffrey. 1994. Collaboration and Conflict: A Contextual Exploration of Group Writing and Positive Emphasis . Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Ede, Lisa S., and Andrea Lunsford. 1990. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing . Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Speck, Bruce W. 2002. Facilitating Students’ Collaborative Writing . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Group Work Evaluation Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

For the work on the project, our class was subdivided into groups. We needed to work in groups during the semester; therefore, the proper distribution of students into members was extremely important. I was lucky to appear in the group of my good friends. That is why, working in team with them was easy and interesting for me. I knew every member of my group before the project, and this made it easier for me to communicate with them. Knowing the personal qualities of every individual allowed us organize the work properly.

Specifically, we managed to distribute the tasks among the group members in a way that guaranteed the sufficiency and competency of every individual. Every member of the group was responsible for some task and its performance. All the members managed to do their tasks on time, and there were no disagreement with any of the members.

At the beginning of the work on the project, I expected the work to be rather complicated. Namely, I had assumed that it would be hard for several group members to cooperate. In fact, I had doubts about the team project to be successful.

I thought that it would have been better and more comfortable for me to work on the project on my own. It was also hard for me to trust the other members, and let them be responsible for some tasks. However, with the flow of the work my vision of the project changed. The team project appeared to be a very interesting and educational type of activity.

What is more, the group project contributed to my general understanding of the subject. As far as the responsibilities were distributed among the members of the team, it was easier for me to analyze every level of the subject.

Group project allowed me doing the research step by step, learning its separate parts, and then analyzing the project as a whole. In comparison with other activities group project proved to be harder to do, but in some cases it was even more helpful. Now I can confidently claim that the process of learning would have been incomplete without the group project.

One more advantage of the group project is that it involved interaction with the other group members. Such activity developed my communicative skills, teached me how to express myself clearly and understand others better.

Furthermore, work in team developed the sense of responsibility in every of the members, as the task of each individual was not only doing his or her own task, but also contributing to the group work. Failing to do the task on time meant not only personal failure, but also letting down of the whole team. I feel that the experience of doing a group project changed my attitude to doing tasks in general, and to the process of learning.

Working on team project was a new kind of activity for me. However, despite the fact that it proved to be very interesting and useful, it is hard for me to decide whether it is the best of the course activities.

I guess that team project is a good kind of work, but it cannot be used alone. Indeed, the textbooks are irreplaceable; they were also helpful in the project. The exercises that we did in the class were very interesting, and they helped to understand the material better.

In addition, while the flow of the project was managed by us, the exercises in class were controlled by the teacher, which guaranteed our adequacy. The films shown in class were also rather helpful, especially for those students, who have a good visual memory. I think that every kind of activity is extremely useful, and all of them need to be used in complex for maximal effect.

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Group Work That Works

Educators weigh in on solutions to the common pitfalls of group work.

Mention group work and you’re confronted with pointed questions and criticisms. The big problems, according to our audience: One or two students do all the work; it can be hard on introverts; and grading the group isn’t fair to the individuals.

But the research suggests that a certain amount of group work is beneficial.

“The most effective creative process alternates between time in groups, collaboration, interaction, and conversation... [and] times of solitude, where something different happens cognitively in your brain,” says Dr. Keith Sawyer, a researcher on creativity and collaboration, and author of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration .

So we looked through our archives and reached out to educators on Facebook to find out what solutions they’ve come up with for these common problems.

Making Sure Everyone Participates

“How many times have we put students in groups only to watch them interact with their laptops instead of each other? Or complain about a lazy teammate?” asks Mary Burns, a former French, Latin, and English middle and high school teacher who now offers professional development in technology integration.

Unequal participation is perhaps the most common complaint about group work. Still, a review of Edutopia’s archives—and the tens of thousands of insights we receive in comments and reactions to our articles—revealed a handful of practices that educators use to promote equal participation. These involve setting out clear expectations for group work, increasing accountability among participants, and nurturing a productive group work dynamic.

Norms: At Aptos Middle School in San Francisco, the first step for group work is establishing group norms. Taji Allen-Sanchez, a sixth- and seventh-grade science teacher, lists expectations on the whiteboard, such as “everyone contributes” and “help others do things for themselves.”

For ambitious projects, Mikel Grady Jones, a high school math teacher in Houston, takes it a step further, asking her students to sign a group contract in which they agree on how they’ll divide the tasks and on expectations like “we all promise to do our work on time.” Heather Wolpert-Gawron, an English middle school teacher in Los Angeles, suggests creating a classroom contract with your students at the start of the year, so that agreed-upon norms can be referenced each time a new group activity begins.

Group size: It’s a simple fix, but the size of the groups can help establish the right dynamics. Generally, smaller groups are better because students can’t get away with hiding while the work is completed by others.

“When there is less room to hide, nonparticipation is more difficult,” says Burns. She recommends groups of four to five students, while Brande Tucker Arthur, a 10th-grade biology teacher in Lynchburg, Virginia, recommends even smaller groups of two or three students.

Meaningful roles: Roles can play an important part in keeping students accountable, but not all roles are helpful. A role like materials manager, for example, won’t actively engage a student in contributing to a group problem; the roles must be both meaningful and interdependent.

At University Park Campus School , a grade 7–12 school in Worcester, Massachusetts, students take on highly interdependent roles like summarizer, questioner, and clarifier. In an ongoing project, the questioner asks probing questions about the problem and suggests a few ideas on how to solve it, while the clarifier attempts to clear up any confusion, restates the problem, and selects a possible strategy the group will use as they move forward.

At Design 39, a K–8 school in San Diego, groups and roles are assigned randomly using Random Team Generator , but ClassDojo , Team Shake , and drawing students’ names from a container can also do the trick. In a practice called vertical learning, Design 39 students conduct group work publicly, writing out their thought processes on whiteboards to facilitate group feedback. The combination of randomizing teams and public sharing exposes students to a range of problem-solving approaches, gets them more comfortable with making mistakes, promotes teamwork, and allows kids to utilize different skill sets during each project.

Rich tasks: Making sure that a project is challenging and compelling is critical. A rich task is a problem that has multiple pathways to the solution and that one person would have difficulty solving on their own.

In an eighth-grade math class at Design 39, one recent rich task explored the concept of how monetary investments grow: Groups were tasked with solving exponential growth problems using simple and compound interest rates.

Rich tasks are not just for math class. When Dan St. Louis, the principal of University Park, was a teacher, he asked his English students to come up with a group definition of the word Orwellian . They did this through the jigsaw method, a type of grouping strategy that John Hattie’s study Visible Learning ranked as highly effective.

“Five groups of five students might each read a different news article about the modern world,” says St. Louis. “Then each student would join a new group of five where they need to explain their previous group’s article to each other and make connections to each. Using these connections, the group must then construct a definition of the word Orwellian .” For another example of the jigsaw approach, see this video from Cult of Pedagogy.

Supporting Introverts

Teachers worry about the impact of group work on introverts. Some of our educators suggest that giving introverts choice in who they’re grouped with can help them feel more comfortable.

“Even the quietest students are usually comfortable and confident when they are with peers with whom they connect,” says Shelly Kunkle, a veteran teacher at Wasawee Middle School in North Webster, Indiana. Wolpert-Gawron asks her students to list four peers they want to work with and then makes sure to pair them with one from their list.

Having defined roles within groups—like clarifier or questioner—also provides structure for students who may be less comfortable within complex social dynamics, and ensures that introverts don’t get overshadowed by their more extroverted peers.

Finally, be mindful that introverted students often simply need time to recharge. “Many introverts do not mind and even enjoy interacting in groups as long as they get some quiet time and solitude to recharge. It’s not about being shy or feeling unsafe in a large group,” says Barb Larochelle, a recently retired high school English teacher in Edmonton, Alberta, who taught for 29 years.

“I planned classes with some time to work quietly alone, some time to interact in smaller groups or as a whole class, and some time to get up and move around a little. A whole class of any one of those is going to be hard on one group, but a balance works well.”

Assessing Group Work

Grading group work is problematic. Often, you don’t have a clear understanding of what each student knows, and a single student’s lack of effort can torpedo the group grade. To some degree, strategies that assign meaningful roles or that require public presentations from groups provide a window in to each student’s knowledge and contributions.

But not all classwork needs to be graded. Suzanna Kruger, a high school science teacher in Seaside, Oregon, doesn’t grade group work—there are plenty of individual assignments that receive grades, and plenty of other opportunities for formative assessment.

John McCarthy, a former high school English and social studies teacher and current education consultant and adjunct professor at Madonna University for the graduate department for education, suggests using group presentations or group products as a non-graded review for a test. But if you want to grade group work, he recommends making all academic assessments within group work individual assessments. For example, instead of grading a group presentation, McCarthy grades each student on an essay, which the students then use to create their group presentation.

Laura Moffit, a fifth-grade teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina, uses self and peer evaluations to shed light on how each student is contributing to group work—starting with a lesson on how to do an objective evaluation. “Just have students circle :), :|, or :( on three to five statements about each partner, anonymously,” Moffit commented on Facebook. “Then give the evaluations back to each group member. Finding out what people really think of your performance is a wake-up call.”

And Ted Malefyt, a middle school science teacher in Hamilton, Michigan, carries a clipboard with the class list formatted in a spreadsheet and walks around checking in on students while they do group work.

“Using this spreadsheet, you have your own record of which student is meeting your expectations and who needs extra help,” explains Malefyt. “As formative assessment takes place, quickly document with simple checkmarks.”

• Career Advice

It’s Good Till It’s Not

By  Margaret Finnegan

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“It was good until it wasn’t,” he said. A veteran, he was older than my typical undergraduates, and he spoke openly, though vaguely, about the traumatic brain injury that earned him classroom accommodations.

He tapped his fingers against his jeans. “My group ignores me. I’m too stressed. It’s triggering my PTSD and making me sick. Can I just work on my own?”

Two ironies struck me. One, I had turned to collaborative learning in order to harness the power of social dynamics and Universal Design for Learning (which focuses on making instruction more inclusive and accessible). I had hoped my group project would keep students engaged and thinking and that it might let them showcase their distinct skill sets.

The second irony was that, during this time, my college-age daughter was surviving her own group-work disaster. She has autism and she was taking a math class with a professor celebrated for his commitment to active learning. The class relied on in-class group work, which meant that, in addition to trying to master the math, she had to navigate the social minefield of working with neurotypical peers in a crowded, fast-paced, loud classroom. It proved disastrous.

Both cases made me wonder: Does group work really help all students? Are some students -- particularly neurodivergent students -- ill served by the turn to group work and learning activities that demand strong social skills?

In puzzling through this problem, I went deep into the research on team-based learning, but I could find no research focused specifically on group work and neurodivergent college students. Indeed, research on student teams tends to suggest that students are pretty interchangeable except for two assumptions: some students are freeloaders. They lack initiative and avoid work. Other students are lone wolves. They are so highly individualistic that they resist collaboration. To embrace such stereotypes, however, is to embrace the idea that groups have problems because particular group members are personally defective. In fact, problems with groups are usually social in nature and stem from lived social dynamics and histories.

This doesn’t mean all group members are perfect or have the best of intentions. It does mean that there are concrete reasons people act the way they do. Work by Curt J. Dommeyer , for example, found that perceived freeloaders often have “unique characteristics” (including “language barriers, cultural differences, learning differences, physical or mental problems, personality traits, and time constraints”) that make it difficult for them to contribute to group projects as much as their peers.

My daughter didn’t mean for her autism-related challenges to make her less productive than her other group members, but they did. She wasn’t freeloading. She was working in a classroom -- in a system -- that does not provide appropriate accommodations for neurodiverse students. Conversely, other work has found that so-called lone wolves don’t believe that they can depend on people. Why would they think that? Because they have learned that they cannot depend on people. My student turned lone wolf because his group ignored him with the most benign of excuses -- they were already friends, it was easier for them to get together alone -- and that made him feel discounted. No wonder he wanted to jettison his peers.

But the two students who excluded my disabled student were also pretty high achieving. Without them saying so, I could tell they thought my student with the brain injury might hold them back. According to Thanh Pham and Thi Hong , that isn’t unusual. It isn’t even unwarranted. In semistructured interviews with high school students, Caroline Koh and other researchers found that teachers often assumed students were “master planners” who naturally knew how to delegate and break large tasks into manageable, sequenced steps. But “low-ability” students in particular often lacked the executive-function skills to do these things. As a result, they stopped showing up to class or demonstrated little interest in the project. On the surface, they seemed like classic freeloaders. Clearly, however, what they lacked was scaffolding. Still, for the students paired with such peers, the reasons for underperformance don’t really matter. What matters to them is a sense of equity and accountability.

Nonetheless, it is the underperforming students I worry about. Whatever stew of social and cultural experiences or linguistic, economic or neural realities have reduced them to group-work piranhas, they have the most to lose in the turn toward collaborative learning. They feel flustered. They feel disrespected. They feel silenced. Brought together in a group, they feel alone and alienated. And vast research shows that the more alienated students feel, the worse their achievement and the more likely that they will drop out.

Making Teams Work

Some faculty members might dismiss my complaints. Particularly, colleagues at elite institutions may feel like research separating low- and high-achieving college students does not speak to them. But ability is relative. There are shrinking violets and dominating personalities at every college and university -- and unless students find a way to come together, group work will not harness the power of social learning but instead reify social hierarchies.

So how can we make teams work so that everyone benefits?

First, if group projects are to be considered important outputs, then training students to work in teams needs to be an important and measurable learning objective. The process of learning to function in a group has to be as important as the product. And that means students need to learn how to identify and delegate team roles, how to set short- and long-term goals, how to plan backward, and -- most importantly -- how to communicate.

In a study on social loafing in student groups, Chris Lam found that more than 50 percent of freeloading problems could be explained by the quality of communication in student groups. But how often are groups taught to communicate? (And no, advising students to exchange contact information doesn’t count.) In particular, students have to be taught to manage conflict. As far back as 1963, Bruce Tuckerman acknowledged that conflict -- what he called storming -- was a natural part of learning how to be a group. But if students don’t learn to confront conflict -- if they only try to avoid it -- they will never reap the cognitive benefits of functioning collaboratively.

Second, the process of learning how to be a team requires time. It has to start early in the semester with faculty members providing students time in class to perform low-stakes group tasks, try out different team roles, deal with minor conflicts and pull faculty over when they need support.

Time is especially important if we want groups to benefit from the power of diversity. Here’s the good news: diversity can add an amazing dynamic to groups. Diversity adds messages of equality and facilitates interaction and understanding. More than that, diverse groups are just better. Research shows that when it comes to ethnicity, diverse groups outperform homogenous groups .

But that, too, takes time. For example, a study of culturally mixed groups on international campuses found that homogenous groups outperformed mixed groups in the short run, but by the end of the semester, the mixed groups had gained the edge. Intercultural collaboration led to greater innovation and creativity. We need to extend how we think about diversity, however, and help students see how all kinds of differences can add to what we know and think.

Third, learning to work in a group means learning to trust a process, and students need to know that they will benefit from the process -- even when that process seems to be leading them to doom. We learn from conflict. We learn from failure. That’s why learning to work in a group also means that students need to learn how to reflect on their own strengths and weaknesses as team members. Instead of focusing on what other team members are doing right or wrong, students need to see how they are personally growing .

Journals, knowledge surveys and personal narrative writing are all tools that help students self-reflect. When students can learn to value what they are personally getting from the arduous process of working in a group, they can worry less about whether other people in the group are pulling them up or down.

I wish I had known this when my own student was struggling. I didn’t. So I told him he could do his own thing. Doing so, I taught him not to grow, not to communicate, but to avoid -- to be a lone wolf. I taught his group members the same thing. Worse, I confirmed their suspicions that struggling students have little to offer.

But with the majority of organizations committing to some sort of team-based structure, none of us can afford to blow it when it comes to having students work collaboratively. The work we do in the classroom sets up ways of thinking that students take with them in the world. If we care about equity and diversity, then giving students the skills to function and grow as group members is a good place to start.

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Eberly Center

Teaching excellence & educational innovation, how can i assess group work.

All of the principles of assessment that apply to individual work apply to group work as well. Assessing group work has added challenges, however. 

First, depending on the objectives of the assignment, the instructor might want to assess the team’s final product (e.g., design, report, presentation), their group processes (e.g., ability to meet deadlines, contribute fairly, communicate effectively), or both. Second, group performance must be translated into individual grades – which raises issues of fairness and equity. Complicating both these issues is the fact that neither group processes nor individual contribution are necessarily apparent in the final product.

Thus, in addition to evaluating the group’s output, instructors may need to find ways to determine how groups functioned and the extent to which individuals contributed to the effort. This isn’t always easy, but these general principles can guide you, and the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence can help you find and implement the right approach for your goals and context.

Assess individual, as well as group, learning and performance.

Assess process as well as product..

• Make your assessment criteria and grading scheme clear .

Find samples of group project assessment tools here...

Diligent students can be profoundly demotivated by group projects if they feel that their own success is dependent on team members who don’t do their share. One way to counteract the motivational hazards of group projects is to assess individual students’ learning and performance in addition to the group’s output. This strategy gives diligent students a greater sense of fairness and control and discourages free ridership. 

Individual learning and performance can be assessed in any number of ways. Some instructors add an individual component to group projects (e.g., a short essay, journal entries); some combine a group project with an individual test or quiz. Both group and individual performance are then reflected in the total project grade (e.g., some faculty members make the group grade worth 50% and the individual grade worth 50%; others split it 80%/20%. There’s no perfect breakdown, but the grading scheme should (a) reflect your goals for student learning and (b) seek to motivate the kind of work you want to see.)

Professor Solomon asks student groups to research a famous anthropological controversy, and give an oral presentation analyzing the issues, positions, and people involved. She assigns a group grade for the presentation, but also requires all the team members to write a short, individual paper summarizing what they learned from the assignment and what they contributed to the team. If the individual piece demonstrates a poor understanding of the material or a low level of participation in the group, she reserves the right to lower the individual’s grade by a full letter grade. If it is particularly informed, thorough, or demonstrates an exceptionally high contribution to the team, she raises the individual’s grade by a full letter grade.

If developing teamwork skills is one of your learning objectives for the course, it’s important to assess students’ progress toward that goal. In other words, you should assess process (how students work) as well as product (the work they produce).

Process can be assessed according to a number of dimensions, such as the ability to generate a range of ideas, listen respectfully to disparate perspectives, distribute work fairly, resolve differences, and communicate effectively. Since instructors don’t always have a direct window into the dynamics of student groups, they often rely on teams to self-report via:

• team evaluations: each member of the team evaluates the dynamics of the team as a whole.
• peer evaluations: each team member evaluates the contributions of his/her teammates. 
• self-evaluations: each team member documents and evaluates his own contributions to the team.
• Find samples of evaluations here...

These assessments can be quantitative or qualitative. They can be done as reflective writing assignments or as questionnaires targeting specific dimensions of teamwork. Think about which tools suit your purpose and context. Also give some thought to when you’ll use them (in the middle of the semester? at the end? both?), who should see them (just you? other team members?), and whether or not they should be anonymous. The Eberly Center can help you find, adapt, or create the right tool and determine how to use it to best effect.

Remember, too, that process assessments are subjective and students are not always straightforward when evaluating one another or themselves. However, in combination with product assessments and individual assessments, they can offer valuable glimpses into how teams function and alert you to major problems (e.g., particularly problematic team members or serious conflict), which can help to inform your feedback and grading.

Professor Montoya assigns a multi-stage information systems project where students work together in teams over much of the semester. Over the course of the semester, he periodically asks students to evaluate both the dynamics of the team as a whole and their own contributions, and to reflect on ways to improve both as the project continues. At the end of the project, he asks students to complete a peer evaluation for every member of their team, indicating each member’s contribution to the group. Professor Montoya’s total grade for the project combines a group grade (75%) and an individual grade (25%). The individual grade is based, in equal parts, on how each student’s teammates evaluated his contribution to the group and on the quality of the feedback he provided to them.

Make your assessment criteria and grading scheme clear.

It’s always important to articulate your performance criteria so students understand your expectations and standards. This is especially true if you are emphasizing skills that are not usually assessed, such as the ability to resolve conflict, delegate tasks, etc. Criteria for evaluating both product and process can be communicated by giving students a group work rubric ( pdf ) before they begin their work and then using it to provide meaningful feedback during and at the end of the project. 

It’s also important to think about how you will weigh the various components of group projects in your grading scheme. Some questions to consider include:

• What percentage of the student’s total project grade will be based on the group’s performance vs. individual components? 
• What percentage will be based on assessments of product vs. assessments of process? 
• How much weight will you give to peer evaluations or self-evaluations? 
• Will feedback from external clients also be incorporated into your assessment of the group’s work? If so, what sorts of feedback will you solicit: feedback on product (e.g., Does it work? Is it a good solution/design?), feedback on process (e.g., Did the group communicate effectively with the client? Did it meet deadlines?), or both?

A number of dimensions of group work can factor, either formally or informally, into a student’s grade. What’s important is to think about what dimensions of student performance matter to you and how your grading criteria and the weighting of assessment components can help motivate the behaviors you want to see. Finally, it’s critical to clearly communicate your grading scheme to students.

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How do you write a reflection essay on group work?

A final assessment is to write a reflection essay about what you learned throughout the subject, including a paragraph about a group a work project we did including what you learned about teamwork and what you’d do better next time etc.

My question is how do you write that when you basically did everything you could, did the work of 3 people on your own and you were the only reason everyone got a decent grade?

Like, how do you write, “There’s nothing I could have done better to make it work, my teammates did fuck all and missed meetings because they just didn’t care and I basically did the whole thing myself” but in an academic way?

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Center for Teaching

Group work: using cooperative learning groups effectively.

Many instructors from disciplines across the university use group work to enhance their students’ learning. Whether the goal is to increase student understanding of content, to build particular transferable skills, or some combination of the two, instructors often turn to small group work to capitalize on the benefits of peer-to-peer instruction. This type of group work is formally termed cooperative learning, and is defined as the instructional use of small groups to promote students working together to maximize their own and each other’s learning (Johnson, et al., 2008).

Cooperative learning is characterized by positive interdependence, where students perceive that better performance by individuals produces better performance by the entire group (Johnson, et al., 2014). It can be formal or informal, but often involves specific instructor intervention to maximize student interaction and learning. It is infinitely adaptable, working in small and large classes and across disciplines, and can be one of the most effective teaching approaches available to college instructors.

What can it look like?

What’s the theoretical underpinning, is there evidence that it works.

• What are approaches that can help make it effective?

Informal cooperative learning groups In informal cooperative learning, small, temporary, ad-hoc groups of two to four students work together for brief periods in a class, typically up to one class period, to answer questions or respond to prompts posed by the instructor.

Additional examples of ways to structure informal group work

Think-pair-share

The instructor asks a discussion question. Students are instructed to think or write about an answer to the question before turning to a peer to discuss their responses. Groups then share their responses with the class.

Peer Instruction

This modification of the think-pair-share involves personal responses devices (e.g. clickers). The question posted is typically a conceptually based multiple-choice question. Students think about their answer and vote on a response before turning to a neighbor to discuss. Students can change their answers after discussion, and “sharing” is accomplished by the instructor revealing the graph of student response and using this as a stimulus for large class discussion. This approach is particularly well-adapted for large classes.

In this approach, groups of students work in a team of four to become experts on one segment of new material, while other “expert teams” in the class work on other segments of new material. The class then rearranges, forming new groups that have one member from each expert team. The members of the new team then take turns teaching each other the material on which they are experts.

Formal cooperative learning groups

In formal cooperative learning students work together for one or more class periods to complete a joint task or assignment (Johnson et al., 2014). There are several features that can help these groups work well:

• The instructor defines the learning objectives for the activity and assigns students to groups.
• The groups are typically heterogeneous, with particular attention to the skills that are needed for success in the task.
• Within the groups, students may be assigned specific roles, with the instructor communicating the criteria for success and the types of social skills that will be needed.
• Importantly, the instructor continues to play an active role during the groups’ work, monitoring the work and evaluating group and individual performance.
• Instructors also encourage groups to reflect on their interactions to identify potential improvements for future group work.

This video shows an example of formal cooperative learning groups in David Matthes’ class at the University of Minnesota:

There are many more specific types of group work that fall under the general descriptions given here, including team-based learning , problem-based learning , and process-oriented guided inquiry learning .

The use of cooperative learning groups in instruction is based on the principle of constructivism, with particular attention to the contribution that social interaction can make. In essence, constructivism rests on the idea that individuals learn through building their own knowledge, connecting new ideas and experiences to existing knowledge and experiences to form new or enhanced understanding (Bransford, et al., 1999). The consideration of the role that groups can play in this process is based in social interdependence theory, which grew out of Kurt Koffka’s and Kurt Lewin’s identification of groups as dynamic entities that could exhibit varied interdependence among members, with group members motivated to achieve common goals. Morton Deutsch conceptualized varied types of interdependence, with positive correlation among group members’ goal achievements promoting cooperation.

Lev Vygotsky extended this work by examining the relationship between cognitive processes and social activities, developing the sociocultural theory of development. The sociocultural theory of development suggests that learning takes place when students solve problems beyond their current developmental level with the support of their instructor or their peers. Thus both the idea of a zone of proximal development, supported by positive group interdependence, is the basis of cooperative learning (Davidson and Major, 2014; Johnson, et al., 2014).

Cooperative learning follows this idea as groups work together to learn or solve a problem, with each individual responsible for understanding all aspects. The small groups are essential to this process because students are able to both be heard and to hear their peers, while in a traditional classroom setting students may spend more time listening to what the instructor says.

Cooperative learning uses both goal interdependence and resource interdependence to ensure interaction and communication among group members. Changing the role of the instructor from lecturing to facilitating the groups helps foster this social environment for students to learn through interaction.

David Johnson, Roger Johnson, and Karl Smith performed a meta-analysis of 168 studies comparing cooperative learning to competitive learning and individualistic learning in college students (Johnson et al., 2006). They found that cooperative learning produced greater academic achievement than both competitive learning and individualistic learning across the studies, exhibiting a mean weighted effect size of 0.54 when comparing cooperation and competition and 0.51 when comparing cooperation and individualistic learning. In essence, these results indicate that cooperative learning increases student academic performance by approximately one-half of a standard deviation when compared to non-cooperative learning models, an effect that is considered moderate. Importantly, the academic achievement measures were defined in each study, and ranged from lower-level cognitive tasks (e.g., knowledge acquisition and retention) to higher level cognitive activity (e.g., creative problem solving), and from verbal tasks to mathematical tasks to procedural tasks. The meta-analysis also showed substantial effects on other metrics, including self-esteem and positive attitudes about learning. George Kuh and colleagues also conclude that cooperative group learning promotes student engagement and academic performance (Kuh et al., 2007).

Springer, Stanne, and Donovan (1999) confirmed these results in their meta-analysis of 39 studies in university STEM classrooms. They found that students who participated in various types of small-group learning, ranging from extended formal interactions to brief informal interactions, had greater academic achievement, exhibited more favorable attitudes towards learning, and had increased persistence through STEM courses than students who did not participate in STEM small-group learning.

The box below summarizes three individual studies examining the effects of cooperative learning groups.

What are approaches that can help make group work effective?

Preparation

Articulate your goals for the group work, including both the academic objectives you want the students to achieve and the social skills you want them to develop.

Determine the group conformation that will help meet your goals.

• In informal group learning, groups often form ad hoc from near neighbors in a class.
• In formal group learning, it is helpful for the instructor to form groups that are heterogeneous with regard to particular skills or abilities relevant to group tasks. For example, groups may be heterogeneous with regard to academic skill in the discipline or with regard to other skills related to the group task (e.g., design capabilities, programming skills, writing skills, organizational skills) (Johnson et al, 2006).
• Groups from 2-6 are generally recommended, with groups that consist of three members exhibiting the best performance in some problem-solving tasks (Johnson et al., 2006; Heller and Hollabaugh, 1992).
• To avoid common problems in group work, such as dominance by a single student or conflict avoidance, it can be useful to assign roles to group members (e.g., manager, skeptic, educator, conciliator) and to rotate them on a regular basis (Heller and Hollabaugh, 1992). Assigning these roles is not necessary in well-functioning groups, but can be useful for students who are unfamiliar with or unskilled at group work.

Choose an assessment method that will promote positive group interdependence as well as individual accountability.

• In team-based learning, two approaches promote positive interdependence and individual accountability. First, students take an individual readiness assessment test, and then immediately take the same test again as a group. Their grade is a composite of the two scores. Second, students complete a group project together, and receive a group score on the project. They also, however, distribute points among their group partners, allowing student assessment of members’ contributions to contribute to the final score.
• Heller and Hollabaugh (1992) describe an approach in which they incorporated group problem-solving into a class. Students regularly solved problems in small groups, turning in a single solution. In addition, tests were structured such that 25% of the points derived from a group problem, where only those individuals who attended the group problem-solving sessions could participate in the group test problem.  This approach can help prevent the “free rider” problem that can plague group work.
• The University of New South Wales describes a variety of ways to assess group work , ranging from shared group grades, to grades that are averages of individual grades, to strictly individual grades, to a combination of these. They also suggest ways to assess not only the product of the group work but also the process.  Again, having a portion of a grade that derives from individual contribution helps combat the free rider problem.

Helping groups get started

Explain the group’s task, including your goals for their academic achievement and social interaction.

Explain how the task involves both positive interdependence and individual accountability, and how you will be assessing each.

Assign group roles or give groups prompts to help them articulate effective ways for interaction. The University of New South Wales provides a valuable set of tools to help groups establish good practices when first meeting. The site also provides some exercises for building group dynamics; these may be particularly valuable for groups that will be working on larger projects.

Monitoring group work

Regularly observe group interactions and progress , either by circulating during group work, collecting in-process documents, or both. When you observe problems, intervene to help students move forward on the task and work together effectively. The University of New South Wales provides handouts that instructors can use to promote effective group interactions, such as a handout to help students listen reflectively or give constructive feedback , or to help groups identify particular problems that they may be encountering.

Assessing and reflecting

In addition to providing feedback on group and individual performance (link to preparation section above), it is also useful to provide a structure for groups to reflect on what worked well in their group and what could be improved. Graham Gibbs (1994) suggests using the checklists shown below.

The University of New South Wales provides other reflective activities that may help students identify effective group practices and avoid ineffective practices in future cooperative learning experiences.

Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., and Cocking, R.R. (Eds.) (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school . Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Bruffee, K. A. (1993). Collaborative learning: Higher education, interdependence, and the authority of knowledge. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Cabrera, A. F., Crissman, J. L., Bernal, E. M., Nora, A., Terenzini, P. T., & Pascarella, E. T. (2002). Collaborative learning: Its impact on college students’ development and diversity. Journal of College Student Development, 43 (1), 20-34.

Davidson, N., & Major, C. H. (2014). Boundary crossing: Cooperative learning, collaborative learning, and problem-based learning. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25 (3&4), 7-55.

Dees, R. L. (1991). The role of cooperative leaning in increasing problem-solving ability in a college remedial course. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 22 (5), 409-21.

Gokhale, A. A. (1995). Collaborative Learning enhances critical thinking. Journal of Technology Education, 7 (1).

Heller, P., and Hollabaugh, M. (1992) Teaching problem solving through cooperative grouping. Part 2: Designing problems and structuring groups. American Journal of Physics 60, 637-644.

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., and Smith, K.A. (2006). Active learning: Cooperation in the university classroom (3 rd edition). Edina, MN: Interaction.

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., and Holubec, E.J. (2008). Cooperation in the classroom (8 th edition). Edina, MN: Interaction.

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., and Smith, K.A. (2014). Cooperative learning: Improving university instruction by basing practice on validated theory. Journl on Excellence in College Teaching 25, 85-118.

Jones, D. J., & Brickner, D. (1996). Implementation of cooperative learning in a large-enrollment basic mechanics course. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference Proceedings.

Kuh, G.D., Kinzie, J., Buckley, J., Bridges, B., and Hayek, J.C. (2007). Piecing together the student success puzzle: Research, propositions, and recommendations (ASHE Higher Education Report, No. 32). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Love, A. G., Dietrich, A., Fitzgerald, J., & Gordon, D. (2014). Integrating collaborative learning inside and outside the classroom. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25 (3&4), 177-196.

Smith, M. E., Hinckley, C. C., & Volk, G. L. (1991). Cooperative learning in the undergraduate laboratory. Journal of Chemical Education 68 (5), 413-415.

Springer, L., Stanne, M. E., & Donovan, S. S. (1999). Effects of small-group learning on undergraduates in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 96 (1), 21-51.

Uribe, D., Klein, J. D., & Sullivan, H. (2003). The effect of computer-mediated collaborative learning on solving ill-defined problems. Educational Technology Research and Development, 51 (1), 5-19.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Group work has been shown to support deep learning, long-term information retention, strengthened communication and teamwork skills, and a greater sense of purpose and dedication to course materials––if groups are formed thoughtfully and given clear parameters ( Monson ;  Oakley et. al. ;  Davis ). Many students and faculty alike have (or have heard) horror stories about group work gone awry. But, research and student feedback show that with a bit of preparation, clear guidelines, and mechanisms for group troubleshooting in place, group work can be more than worth the effort. 

Setting Groups Up for Success

"Professors have three major responsibilities concerning the implementation of [group work]––forming groups, training students to be effective collaborators, and managing collaborative groups." ––B.W. Speck

There are many ways to use student groups in your classes, from informal, short-term think-pair-share duos to small discussion groups that are formed and disbanded each class session, writing circles that persist for an entire essay cycle, and formal, long-term groups collaborating on a major course assignment. All of them require some level of instructor guidance on how groups should be formed, how group work should be approached, and what the goals of the work are. In some cases, asking students to turn to a classmate and share a question or comment is sufficient preparation. In others, much more scaffolding needs to be in place if students are to navigate their work successfully as a group. See the figure below for a quick overview of what such scaffolding might look like, based on the duration and goals of group work. 

three-panel_detailed_storyboard.png

For the purposes of this article, we will focus on groups that will be working together for a week or more, because the length and complexity of the work such groups do together requires more planning and support. While the specific needs of such groups will depend upon the nature of the assignment, subject matter, and course learning objectives, the literature on group formation and collaborative student work provides some important considerations that are relevant to many cases, across disciplines. Here, these considerations are broken out into three categories: group formation, group training, and group management. 

Note: COVID has, predictably, affected students' experience of group work, and not only due to the pivot to remote learning. For an in depth discussion of COVID and student group work, see "Student Teamwork During COVID-19: Challenges, Changes, and Consequences" ( Wildman, et. al. ). Click here to see a  summary of the paper's key insights .

Group Formation

For long-term collaborations, groups should be created by instructors . 

Student-selected groups are  more likely to lead to "social slacking" and self-segregation .

Additionally, student-selected groups  are less likely to lead to interdependence and collaboration . Students in the same group may end up breaking apart the project and working separately, or, one student may end up bearing the brunt of the workload.

One study indicated that "students found by a two-to-one ratio that their worst group work experiences were with self-formed groups" ( Feitchner and Davis ).

Self-selected groups  tend to be homogeneous  in terms of student skill-level and subject-matter experience, gender, and race.

For many types of group work, the ideal group size is 3-4 students . 

Exceptions include groups formed for  team-based-learning , which works well with 5-7 students, and  ensemble practices in the arts , which range widely in group size.  STEM-specific studies  suggest groups of 3-5. 

These smaller sizes help ensure that every group member has a meaningful role, while also making sure that there are enough perspectives represented to prevent inquiry from stalling (see group training, below, for resources on group roles). 

In general: "The less skilful the group members, the smaller the groups should be. The shorter amount of time available, the smaller the groups should be" ( Davis ).

Groups thrive when their members are diverse  (in terms of skill, prior subject-matter experience, and, yes, demographics). 

More specifically, "groups that are gender-balanced, are ethnically diverse, and have members with different problem-solving approaches have been shown to exhibit enhanced collaboration" ( Wilson, Brickman, and Brame ).

Conversely,  minority group members are most successful––in your class, and in their academic lives more generally––when they aren't isolated.

Isolated students may not feel empowered to speak and contribute at the same level as their fellow group members. "Studies have shown that when members of at-risk minority groups are isolated in project teams, they tend either to adopt relatively passive roles within the team or are relegated to such roles, thereby losing many of the benefits of the team interactivity" ( Heller and Hollobaugh  qtd in  Oakley et. al. ).

We know, for example, that men are 1.6x more likely to speak in class than women ( Lee and McCabe  2021). This issue is compounded by isolation within groups. 

In fact, such unsuccessful group experiences may contribute to student retention issues: "The isolation these individuals feel within their teams could also contribute to a broader sense of isolation in the student body at large, which may in turn increase the dropout risk" ( Heller and Hollobaugh  qtd in  Oakley et. al. ).

There is some evidence that  teamwork- or working-style has more of an impact on group cohesion than prior academic experience or skill  with the subject matter.

"Generally, groups that are gender-balanced, are ethnically diverse, and have members with different problem-solving approaches have been shown to exhibit enhanced collaboration. The data on academic performance as a diversity factor do not point to a single conclusion" ( Wilson, Brickman, and Brame ).

And, finally, from a logistical viewpoint: if you don't provide dedicated group working time in class,  group members will need common blocks of free time  to meet outside of class.

X-hours can be fantastic as dedicated group-work time, if your course plan allows. 

Group Training

"When a professor assumes that students will automatically work well together and provides little or no training in group success, groups can fall apart." ––B.W. Speck

Students express higher levels of satisfaction when instructors are explicit about the process and expectations of group work.  

Setting expectations can help ameliorate student aversion to group work rooted in past negative experiences ( Felder and Brent  1996).

Groups tend not to differentiate between "social loafers" and team members who are struggling with the project or course content, exhibiting destructive behavior toward group members who fall into either category equally. By being transparent about the benefits of group work as well as the expectations about how group work should proceed, instructors can prevent much of this potential for group dysfunction ( Freeman and Greenacre ).

Giving students individual (rotating) roles within their group can help instill individual ownership of the project as well as foster collaboration and interdependence.

For instance,  Oakley et. al.  outline a four person team using the following roles:

Coordinator - "keeps everyone on task and makes sure everyone is involved."

Recorder - "prepares the final solution to be turned in."

Monitor - "checks to make sure everyone understands both the solution and the strategy used to get it."

Checker - "double-checks it before it is handed in." 

Other roles might include:

Encourager  - "encourages group members to continue to think through their approaches and ideas. The Encourager uses probing questions to help facilitate deeper thinking, and group-wide consideration of ideas" ( Fournier ).

Questioner - "pushes back when the team comes to consensus too quickly, without considering a number of options or points of view. The questioner makes sure that the group hears varied points of view, and that the group is not avoiding potentially rich areas of disagreement" ( Fournier ).

Reflector / Strategy Analyst - "observes team dynamics and guides the consensus-building process (helps group members come to a common conclusion)" ( Fournier ).

Spokesperson / Presenter - "presents the group's ideas to the rest of the class. The Spokesperson should rely on the recorder's notes to guide their report" ( Fournier ).

Requiring group members to rotate through these roles during the term "can help students develop communications skills in a variety of areas rather than relying on a single personal strength" ( Fournier ).

Functional groups develop "norms," "charters," or social contracts with agreed upon behaviors, values, and conflict-management practices. 

For example, The 3 Be's of Collaborative Writing B.W. Speck uses with collaborative writing groups: 

Be Responsible

Be Organized

3beswriting0.png

The University of Connecticut Writing Center offers this  group contract  template to be used after forming groups, but before assigning roles as a means to "prevent group discord" and "create a consensus on expectations.

Group Management

Even the most strategically formed groups may still fail if they aren't given sufficient guidance, or management. Some of the most important things to consider when determining how you and your students will work together to manage groups are: 

Group Persistence  (will students stay in a single group all term, or will groups be formed and reformed throughout the term?)

Motivation  (what scaffolding needs to be in place to keep groups motivated?)

"To promote both accountability and autonomy, instructors should create milestones and deadlines for groups but also provide time for the students to expressly assign duties and roles to meet those deadlines" ( Wilson, Brickman, and Brame ).

Dartmouth faculty member, Professor Deborah Brooks, recommends building in opportunities for  Peer Recognition . 

For discussion groups, you may want to consider occasional opportunities for  peer shout outs   (for example, a student might want to shout out a group member who helped them understand something in a new way). 

For longer, more formal group projects,  peer awards  can offer groups a fun way to recognize and celebrate their work as well as providing faculty some insight into the way groups worked together. 

Assessment  (how will group and individual work be assessed? how will students assess their own work and the group as a whole?)

Although it may not be appropriate for all types of group work to be graded, for group projects or assignments, it can be beneficial to assess both the work of the group as a whole and the work of individual group members.

Felder and Brent suggest:

Giving "individual tests that cover all of the material on the team assignments and projects" ( Felder and Brent  2007).

Making "groups responsible for seeing that non-contributors don't get credit" ( Felder and Brent  2007).

Using "peer ratings to make individual adjustments to team assignment grades" ( Felder and Brent  2007).

In addition to assessment via grading, it is important to structure in opportunities for student and group self-assessment.

"Once or twice during the group work task," Barbara Gross Davis suggests, "ask group members to discuss two questions: What action has each member taken that was helpful for the group? What action could each member take to make the group even better?" ( Davis ).

Felder and Brent suggest making plans for "periodic self-assessment of team functioning" every few weeks via written responses to questions such as ( Felder and Brent  2007):

How well are we meeting our goals and expectations?

What are we doing well?

What needs improvement?

What (if anything) will we do differently next time?

Troubleshooting  (what happens when groups encounter a problem? what if a group fails to cohere?)

Make a contingency plan to chart out what happens when

Students drop the course, leaving groups too small or imbalance

A group fails to cohere.

Some research suggests that giving students the ability to "fire" a group member who isn't contributing can be an effective strategy ( Felder and Brent  2007).

But resist the urge to dissolve and reform groups frequently.

Studies have shown that:

"It takes at least [one month] for the teams to encounter problems, and learning to work through the problems is an important part of teamwork skill development" ( Felder and Brent  2007).

Build in opportunities for students to tell you how the group work is going:

"Conduct a midterm assessment to find out how students feel about teamwork" ( Felder and Brent  2007).

and,  Opportunities for Reflection and Feedback ( will students have a chance to reflect on their group work? how will students report what's happening in their group to you? how will you provide feedback to groups?)

Thomas Wenzel notes that peer- and self-assessment, combined with instructor observations, are critical in courses using group work not only to identify dysfunctional groups but also to identify the contributions of each group member ( Wenzel ). 

See this  Team Peer Assessment  developed by Angela R. Linse of the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence 

See the final pages of  Oakley et. al.  for a useful set of reflective and evaluative worksheets. Namely:

Evaluation of Progress Toward Effective Team Functioning

Team Member Evaluation Form

Peer Rating of Team Members

Autorating System

Note: peer rating and assessment are likely to be most useful as a conversation starter regarding group dynamics and norms.

Team Formation Tool

The Team Formation Tool, a Canvas app developed at Dartmouth, is a survey-based tool for the creation of optimized student groups. With the Team Formation Tool, instructors can create custom surveys designed to sort students into groups based on a cluster of predetermined criteria including time zone, teamwork and working style, preferred time of day to study, and more.

To learn more about the Team Formation Tool, read the overview here or contact  [email protected] . To have the Team Formation Tool installed in your Canvas course, submit a  Canvas Support Request here , and enter Team Formation Tool Installation in the  Short Description of Problem  field.

Additional Resources

Using Student Groups in Your Teaching

Episode 073 - Team Based Learning with Jim Sibley , Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast

Babson College  Group Project Survival Guide

Effective Strategies for Cooperative Learning .

CBE––Life Sciences Education evidence-based teaching guide for Group Work .

Alison Burke's  article, " How to Use Groups Effectively ."

Curated list of resources about  Collaborative Learning & Group Work

Curated list of  podcast episodes about group learning

Teach Remotely: Collaborative Projects  discussion, facilitated by DCAL

Davis, Barbara Gross. Tools for Teaching. Vol. 1st ed, Jossey-Bass, 1993. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,url,uid&db=nlebk&AN=26088&site=ehost-live&scope=site. 

Feichtner, S. B., and E. A. Davis. "Why Some Groups Fail: A Survey of Students' Experiences with Learning Groups." Journal of Management Education, vol. 9, no. 4, Nov. 1984, pp. 58–73. DOI.org (Crossref), doi: 10.1177/105256298400900409 .

Felder, Richard M., and Rebecca Brent. "Navigating the Bumpy Road to Student-Centered Instruction." College Teaching, vol. 44, no. 2, Apr. 1996, pp. 43–47. DOI.org (Crossref), doi: 10.1080/87567555.1996.9933425 .

Felder, Richard M., and Rebecca Brent. "Cooperative Learning." Active Learning, edited by Patricia Ann Mabrouk, vol. 970, American Chemical Society, 2007, pp. 34–53. DOI.org (Crossref), doi: 10.1021/bk-2007-0970.ch004 .

Fournier, Eric. "Using Roles in Group Work." Washington University in St. Louis Center for Teaching and Learning,  https://ctl.wustl.edu/resources/using-roles-in-group-work/ . Accessed 2 Feb. 2021.

Freeman, Lynne, and Luke Greenacre. "An Examination of Socially Destructive Behaviors in Group Work." Journal of Marketing Education - J Market Educ, vol. 33, Apr. 2011, pp. 5–17. ResearchGate, doi: 10.1177/0273475310389150 .

Gaunt, Helena, and Danielle Shannon Treacy. "Ensemble Practices in the Arts: A Reflective Matrix to Enhance Team Work and Collaborative Learning in Higher Education." Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 19, no. 4, SAGE Publications, Oct. 2020, pp. 419–44. SAGE Journals, doi: 10.1177/1474022219885791 .

Hassanien, Ahmed. "Student Experience of Group Work and Group Assessment in Higher Education." Journal of Teaching in Travel & Tourism, vol. 6, no. 1, July 2006, pp. 17–39. DOI.org (Crossref), doi: 10.1300/J172v06n01_02 .

Heller, Patricia, and Mark Hollabaugh. "Teaching Problem Solving through Cooperative Grouping. Part 2: Designing Problems and Structuring Groups." American Journal of Physics, vol. 60, no. 7, American Association of Physics Teachers, July 1992, pp. 637–44. aapt.scitation.org (Atypon), doi: 10.1119/1.17118 .

Monson, Renee. "Groups That Work: Student Achievement in Group Research Projects and Effects on Individual Learning." Teaching Sociology, vol. 45, no. 3, SAGE Publications Inc, July 2017, pp. 240–51. SAGE Journals, doi: 10.1177/0092055X17697772 .

Oakley, Barbara, et al. "Turning Student Groups into Effective Teams." Journal of Student Centered Learning, vol. 2, no. 1, 2004, pp. 9-34.  https://www.engr.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/drive/1ofGhdOciEwloA2zofffqkr7jG3SeKRq3/2004-Oakley-paper(JSCL).pdf  

Speck, Bruce W. Facilitating Students' Collaborative Writing. Jossey-Bass, 2002,  https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/ERIC-ED466716/pdf/ERIC-ED466716.pdf , Accessed 2 Feb 2021

Wenzel, Thomas J. "Evaluation Tools To Guide Students' Peer-Assessment and Self-Assessment in Group Activities for the Lab and Classroom." Journal of Chemical Education, vol. 84, no. 1, 2007, p. 182.

Wildman, Jessica, et al. "Student Teamwork During COVID-19: Challenges, Changes, and Consequences." Small Group Research, vol. 0, no. 0, 2021, pp. 1–16.

Wilson, KJ, et al. "Evidence Based Teaching Guide: Group Work." CBE Life Science Education,  http://lse.ascb.org/evidence-based-teaching-guides/group-work/ . Accessed 2 Feb. 2021.

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Guide to Group Work

This page will inform you about the nature of group work, about what you should expect and the expectations teachers have of you in group learning situations.

Learning and working effectively as part of a team or group is an extremely important skill, and one that you will refine and use throughout your working life. Group projects should be among the most valuable and rewarding learning experiences. For many students, however, they are also among the most frustrating.

Here are some pointers to help you work effectively on your group tasks and assignments. These are mostly general principles that you should apply to group work here, in other courses and in the workplace.

Why we use group learning tasks

Learning in groups means that you need to share your knowledge and ideas with other students. There are two principal ways that you benefit from doing this:

• you need to think carefully about your own ideas in order to explain them to others
• you expand your own awareness by taking account of the knowledge and ideas of others.

When you work as a group on a project or assignment, then you have the opportunity to draw on the different strengths of group members, to produce a more extensive and higher quality project or assignment than you could complete on your own.

To do this effectively you need to learn group work skills, which are an extremely important part of your professional development. In most professions people are required to work in multidisciplinary project teams or teams with a responsibility for a specific task. Many professional organisations and employer groups stress the importance of interpersonal and group skills, such as communication, negotiation, problem solving, and teamwork. These skills can be as important as your subject knowledge in enabling you to be an effective professional.

This kind of group work is actually an ongoing process of generating ideas and planning as a group, working as an individual to carry out parts of that plan and then communicating as a group to draw the individual components together and plan the next step.

Skills in group work

Group work requires both interpersonal and process management skills. Group work is included in a course to provide a safe environment in which you can try out new ideas and practices and learn some group skills. Some of the skills you need to develop are outlined here, you will discover some others for yourself.

Interpersonal skills

• Building positive working relationships
• Communicating effectively in meetings
• Negotiating to agree on tasks and resolve conflicts
• Accommodating people with different cultural orientations and work habits

Process management skills

• Identifying group goals and dividing work
• Planning and complying with meeting schedules and deadlines
• Managing time to meet group expectations
• Monitoring group processes and intervening to correct problems

Interpersonal skills and considerations

• Take some time early on to chat with and get to know each of your group mates. The better you know one another and the more comfortable you are communicating with one another, the more effectively you will be able to work together. The online discussion set up for your group can be used to exchange information about backgrounds and interests as an icebreaker that elicits information that may not normally be available. The online discussion often helps people who are shy or reluctant to speak in a conversational way.
• feel comfortable voicing their opinions, and feel that these opinions will be listened to.
• feel that all group members are contributing positively to the tasks by keeping to agreed procedures and plans and producing good quality work, on time.
• feel that their feelings are being considered by team members, yet the goals and objectives of the group are not being compromised to accommodate the whim or the wants of a few members.

Make sure that you both express your views and listen to others. There is nothing wrong with disagreeing with your group mates, no matter how confident they may seem to be about what they are saying. When you disagree, be constructive and focus on the issue rather than the person. Likewise when someone disagrees with you, respect what they are saying and the risk that they took in expressing their opinion. Try to find a way forward that everybody can agree to and that isn't the opinion of just one confident or outspoken member.

Managing the process

Effective group work does not happen by accident. It involves deliberate effort, and because there are many people involved it must not be left up to memory; good note taking is essential. Following these steps will help you and your group to work effectively together.

• Have clear objectives . At each stage you should try to agree on goals. These include a timetable for progress on the project as well as more immediate goals (e.g. to agree on an approach to the assignment by Friday). Each meeting or discussion should also begin with a goal in mind (e.g. to come up with a list of tasks that need to be done).
• Set ground rules . Discussions can become disorderly and can discourage shyer group members from participating if you don't have procedures in place for encouraging discussion, coming to resolution without becoming repetitive, and resolving differences of opinion. Set rules at the outset and modify them as necessary along the way. An interesting rule that one group made was that anybody who missed a meeting would buy the rest of the group a cup of coffee from the coffee shop. Nobody ever missed a meeting after that.
• Communicate efficiently . Make sure you communicate regularly with group members. Try to be clear and positive in what you say without going on or being repetitive.
• Build consensus . People work together most effectively when they are working toward a goal that they have agreed to. Ensure that everyone has a say, even if you have to take time to get more withdrawn members to say something. Make sure you listen to everyone's ideas and then try to come to an agreement that everyone shares and has contributed to.
• Define roles . Split the work to be done into different tasks that make use of individual strengths. Having roles both in the execution of your tasks and in meetings / discussions (e.g. Arani is responsible for summarising discussions, Joseph for ensuring everybody has a say and accepts resolutions etc.) can help to make a happy, effective team. See Sharing and organising work for more information.
• Clarify . When a decision is made, this must be clarified in such a way that everyone is absolutely clear on what has been agreed, including deadlines.
• Keep good records . Communicating on the online discussion for your group provides a good record of discussion. Try to summarise face-to-face discussions and especially decisions, and post them to the online discussion so that you can refer back to them. This includes lists of who has agreed to do what.
• Stick to the plan . If you agreed to do something as part of the plan, then do it. Your group are relying on you to do what you said you would do not what you felt like doing. If you think the plan should be revised, then discuss this.
• Monitor progress and stick to deadlines . As a group, discuss progress in relation to your timetable and deadlines. Make sure that you personally meet deadlines to avoid letting your group down.

Set up a contract

A useful tool to help with the steps above is a contract. Within the first week of each group task you and your group will need to negotiate and agree to a contract. In this signed agreement, you will outline what you are going to do, who is going to do what, and by when. As a guide to negotiating your group contracts a contract proforma is reproduced at the end of this document.

Sharing and organising work online

Two kinds of work must be shared: to make the team function and the task to be performed.

Making the team function

An effective team requires the following roles to work efficiently. It is useful to explicitly allocate these functions.

• Facilitator or leader (depending on context) for making sure the aims of the meeting are clarified and for summarising discussions and decisions; to ensure the meeting keeps on track and ground rules are followed.
• Note taker to keep a record of ideas that are discussed and decisions that are made and who is doing what.
• Time keeper to make sure that you discuss everything you need to in the time available for the meeting.
• Progress chaser to chase people up and make sure that the jobs get done by the time agreed and sort out problems if they are not.
• Process watcher someone who has an eye on process rather than content and can bring problems to the attention of the team. It is important to be positive in this role and not judgemental.
• Editor to compile contributions, identify gaps or overlaps, and ensure consistency in the final submission.

Sharing the task

Tasks need to be broken down into smaller parts and scheduled. Sometimes one part cannot be started until another part is finished so it may be worth drawing a simple time line.

• Consider the resources that you have and those that you will need to find.
• Define the outcome required.
• Consider how will you know when you have done it well enough?
• Divide the tasks among the team and
• Set the deadlines for the sub-tasks and times for future meetings.

Team writing

Three methods are possible (and acceptable).

• One person writes the lot -this tends to mean a narrow range of idea are used and the rest of the team don’t learn from the activity of preparing the report.
• Each person writes one bit - it is then hard to make a single coherent report and you don’t learn about much except your own section.
• Joint writing. This is the most productive way of approaching group tasks, and ensures the greatest benefits from collaboration. Eg: Each section has a writer and at least one reviewer with each team member being both a writer and a reviewer of some section. The final product should be reviewed by all team members prior to finalisation by the editor. Alternatively you can have a single writer with others editing, adding and proof reading and someone tidying up the finished report.

Check the following:

• Is the objective of the exercise clear from the report?
• Are the conclusions or recommendations clear?
• Do conclusions follow from the body of the report?
• Do the sections fit together well?
• Does the report achieve the objectives (and the assessment criteria)?
• Are the required components adequately covered?

Whichever method you use, all group members should agree on the process, and how they are going to maximise the collaborative approach to writing.

Collaborative writing

Writing collaboratively is one of the trickiest parts of group work. There are many ways to do this, and your group will have to resolve how to divide the work of writing, collating, editing and putting the final touches on your work. Writing by committee (six people crowded around a keyboard) is a recipe for conflict and lack of progress. The other extreme, where one person takes the most responsibility and ends up doing most of the work, is also unproductive and promotes resentment.

Try to divide the initial writing into tasks, and tackle these individually or in pairs. Once the first drafts of the components have been written, circulate all the components and read them. You will probably need to get together to discuss how to marry them together so that they are consistent with one another. Any members who were not involved in the initial writing can do some of this work. Then edit, improve and polish the manuscript.

Circulate the files as online discussion attachments, or set up a Google doc or Wiki for everyone to add to. If using attachments, ensure that everybody knows who has and is working on the current version; otherwise it becomes

Monitoring group effectives and overcoming problems

The checklist at the end of this document provides a list of common issues that emerge in group work. Use it regularly to identify problems before they get out of hand. If major problems and tensions do arise, use it to identify where things may be going wrong. First answer each question about yourself, then answer it about the group as a whole. Then get together as a group and discuss where each of you think there may be problems and consider how you might overcome these problems.

Group tasks and assignments may mean that marks are assigned to everybody in the group based on the result for the whole group. It is in everybody's interest to ensure an effective contribution from all group members, to make sure that the finished assignment is of high quality. Sometimes a system of peer assessment will be used to determine the relative contributions of everyone to the group process. This could be used to moderate the marks for the assignment, or simply as a way to provide feedback on your group work skills.

Teamwork checklist

Each member should complete this checklist. You will need time to reflect in order to make this a worthwhile exercise. You should complete this exercise reasonably regularly in order to monitor and improve how effectively your group is working.

• Answer each question regarding your own performance in the group.
• Answer each question regarding the rest of the group.
• Get together with your whole group and discuss where you think any problems are arising.

Discuss what you are going to do to overcome these problems.

Adapted from Scoufis (2000).

Teamwork contract

Here's an example of how you might format a group contract.

We, the members of .....(group name)..... agree to the following plan of action regarding our work toward the group assignment tasks:

(The following is a list of items you may wish to include in your contract).

Meetings and communication

• Times and places for in person meetings.
• Frequency of checks to WebCT discussion area.
• Rules and procedures during face-to-face meetings.
• Who will summarise decisions, when will he/she post them on the discussion area.

Work and deadlines

• How will the group come to agreement on a topic (what research are members expected to do before you meet / go online to discuss the topic)?
• When will you make a final decision on a topic?
• Who will write the first draft of and who will first edit each component? Deadlines.
• Who will collate the whole submission and then circulate it for the group to comment on? Deadline.
• Who will prepare and submit the final submission? Deadline.
• What happens if members don’t meet agreed-to deadlines?
• What happens if members do not contribute / come to meetings?

The agreement should be finalised within the first week. It must be signed and dated by the group members. Each member should get a copy, a copy should be posted on the discussion area and the original should be submitted to your tutor.

Acknowledgement

This document (version: BA300112) was developed by staff at the Learning and Teaching Unit at UNSW, and includes material adapted from handouts developed by faculty teaching staff at UNSW.

• Gibbs, G. (1994). Learning in Teams: A student Manual. Oxford: The Oxford Centre for Staff Development.
• Scoufis, M. (2000). Integrating Graduate Attributes into the Undergraduate Curricula. University of Western Sydney. (ISBN 1863418725).

Lectures, tutorials, group work

• Discussion skills
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Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion?

You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Saint petersburg.

Ewer and basin (lavabo set)

Probably made at Chisinau Court Workshop

Andrei Nikiforovich Voronikhin

Alexander Danilovich Menshikov (1673–1729)

Unknown Artist, Swiss, Austrian, or German, active Russia ca. 1703–4

Samuel Margas Jr.

The Empress Elizabeth of Russia (1709–1762) on Horseback, Attended by a Page

Attributed to Georg Christoph Grooth

Table snuffbox

Niello scenes after a print entitled Naufrage (Shipwreck) by Jacques de Lajoüe , published in Paris 1736

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778)

Jean Antoine Houdon

Imperial Porcelain Manufactory, St. Petersburg

Cup with cover and saucer

Two bottle coolers

Zacharias Deichman the Elder

Catherine II The Great, Empress of Russia

Jean-Baptiste Nini

Coffee service

Johan Henrik Blom

Tureen with cover

Tureen with cover and stand

Jacques-Nicolas Roettiers

Possibly by Pierre-François-Mathis de Beaulieu (for Jean Georges)

Pair of scallop-shell dishes

Sugar bowl (from a tea service)

Workshop of David Roentgen

Beaker and saucer

David Roentgen and Company in Saint Petersburg

Johann Friedrich Anthing

Drop-front desk (secrétaire à abattant or secrétaire en cabinet)

Attributed to Martin Carlin

Pair of Flintlock Pistols of Empress Catherine the Great (1729–1796)

Johan Adolph Grecke

Gardner Manufactory

Center table

Imperial Armory, Tula (south of Moscow), Russia

Female Shaman

Pair of vases

Nikolai Stepanovich Vereshchagin

Jugate busts of Czarevitch Paul and Maria Feodorovna of Russia

James Tassie

Wolfram Koeppe Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2003

The Birth of Saint Petersburg Russia, or “Muscovy” as it was often called, had rarely been considered a part of Europe before the reign of Czar Peter I (Piotr Alexeievich), known as Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725). His supremacy marked the beginning of the country’s “Westernization,” whereby the political, economic, and cultural norms of the western European monarchies would become the basis for “civilizing” Russia. A radical transformation was needed to launch Russia into the modern world, a transformation later called the Petrine Revolution. The young czar, feeling oppressed by the medieval traditions and ecclesiastical patriarchy of seventeenth-century Moscow, wanted to Westernize Russia in a hurry, defying the sluggish pace of history.

Saint Petersburg was born on May 16, 1703 (May 5 by the old Julian Russian calendar). On that day, on a small island on the north bank of the Neva River, Peter cut two pieces of turf and placed them cross-wise. The setting was inauspicious. The area was a swamp that remained frozen from early November to March, with an annual average of 104 days of rain and 74 days of snow. The army, under the command of Alexander Menshikov ( 1996.7 ), had conquered the region shortly before. To show his gratitude, the czar later appointed Menshikov the first governor-general of Saint Petersburg. The fortification of the territory kept the Swedish enemy at bay and secured for Russia permanent access to the Baltic Sea. The partially ice-free harbor would be crucial to further economic development. All buildings on the site were erected on wooden poles driven into the marshy, unstable ground. Stones were a rare commodity in Russia, and about as valuable as precious metals.

The Dutch name “Piterburkh” (later changed to the German version, “Petersburg”) embodied the czar’s fascination with Holland and its small-scale urban architecture. He disliked patriarchal court ceremony and felt at ease in the bourgeois domestic life that he experienced during his travels throughout Europe on “the Great Embassy” (1697–98). However, the primary purpose of this voyage was to acquire firsthand knowledge of shipbuilding—his personal passion—and to learn about progressive techniques and Western ideas.

The victory over the Swedish army at Poltava in June 1709 elevated Russia to the rank of a European power, no longer to be ignored. Peter triumphed: “Now with God’s help the final stone in the foundation of Saint Petersburg has been laid.” By 1717, the city’s population of about 8,000 had tripled, and grew to around 40,000 by the time of Peter’s death in 1725. Saint Petersburg had become the commercial, industrial, administrative, and residential “metropolis” of Russia. By the 1790s, it had surpassed Moscow as the empire’s largest urban vicinity and was hailed as the “Venice of the North,” an allusion to the waterway system around the local “Grand Canal,” the Neva River.

Peter the Great’s Successors The short reign of Peter’s second wife, Empress Catherine I (r. 1725–27), who depended on her long-time favorite Menshikov, saw the reinstatement of the luxurious habits of the former imperial household. The archaic and ostentatious court display in the Byzantine tradition  that Peter had so despised was now to be restored under the pretext of glorifying his legacy. Enormous sums of money were lavished on foreign luxury items, demonstrating the court’s new international status and its observance of western European manners ( 68.141.133 ).

During the reigns of Empress Anna Ioannovna (r. 1730–40), niece of Peter I ( 1982.60.330a,b ), and her successor Elizabeth (Elizaveta Petrovna, r. 1741–62; 1978.554.2 ), Peter’s daughter, Saint Petersburg was transformed into a Baroque extravaganza through the talents of architect Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli (1700–1771) and other Western and Russian artisans. Foreign powers began to recognize Russia’s importance and competed for closer diplomatic relations. Foreign immigrants increased much faster than the local population, as scholars, craftsmen, artisans, and specialists of all kinds flocked to the country, and especially to Saint Petersburg ( 65.47 ; 1982.60.172,.173 ; 1995.327 ).

Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96) In a coup d’état assisted by the five Orloff brothers ( 33.165.2a–c ; 48.187.386,.387 ), Catherine II overthrew her husband, the ill-fated Peter III (r. 1762) and became empress. Catherine saw herself as the political heir of Peter the Great. A German-born princess of Anhalt-Zerbst who, after her marriage, became more Russian than any native, Catherine aimed at completing Peter’s legacy ( 52.189.11 ; 48.73.1 ). Having lived in isolation in the shadow of Elizabeth I since her marriage to the grand duke in 1745, the time had come to satisfy her thirst for life and her insatiable quest for culture and international recognition. An admirer of the Enlightenment and devoted aficionada of Voltaire’s writings, Catherine stimulated his cult in Russia ( 1972.61 ). In response, the French philosopher dedicated a poem to the czarina; her reply, dated October 15, 1763, initiated a correspondence that influenced the empress on many matters until Voltaire’s death in 1778. The hothouse cultural climate of Saint Petersburg during Catherine’s reign can be compared to the artistic and intellectual ferment in New York City in the second half of the twentieth century.

Catherine’s desire to enhance her fame and her claim to the throne was immortalized by her own witty play on words in Latin: “Petro Primo / Catharina Secunda” (To Peter the First / from Catherine the Second). This she had inscribed on the vast lump of granite in the form of a wave supporting the Bronze Horseman on the banks of the Neva in front of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. This triple-lifesize equestrian figure of Peter the Great took the French sculptor Falconet twelve years to complete, until it was finally cast—after three attempts—in 1782.

Catherine had military expansion plans for Russia and a cultural vision for its capital Saint Petersburg. Above all, she knew how to attract devoted supporters. Only nine days after the overthrow of her husband, Catherine wrote to Denis Diderot, offering to print his famous Encyclopédie , which had been banned in France. Catherine recognized the power of art to demonstrate political and social maturity. She acquired entire collections of painting ( Watteau , for example), sculpture, and objects. The empress avoided anything that could be called mediocre or small. With the help of sophisticated advisors, such as Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn, her ambassador in Paris, Denis Diderot, Falconet, and the illustrious Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, the empress assembled the core of today’s State Hermitage Museum. Catherine favored luxury goods from all over Europe ( 33.165.2a–c ; 48.187.386,.387 ; 17.190.1158 ). She commissioned Sèvres porcelain and Wedgwood pottery as well as hundreds of pieces of ingeniously conceived furniture from the German manufactory of David Roentgen in Neuwied ( 48.73.1 ). Furthermore, she encouraged and supported Russian enterprises and craftsmen, like local silversmiths ( 47.51.1–.5 ; 1981.367.1,.2 ) and the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory ( 1982.60.171 ; 1982.60.177,.178 ; 1982.60.175 ), as well as privately owned manufactories ( 1982.60.158 ). Catherine especially liked the sparkling decorative products of the Tula armory steel workshop ( 2002.115 ), genuine Russian art forms with a fairy-tale-like appearance, and in 1775 merged her large collection of Tula objects with the imperial crown jewels in a newly constructed gallery at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg.

Catherine’s son and successor Paul I (Pavel Petrovich, r. 1796–1801) disliked his mother and her aesthetic sensibility ( 1998.13.1,.2 ). As grand duke, he had spent most of his time with his second wife Maria Feodorovna ( 1999.525 ) outside of Saint Petersburg, in Gatchina Palace and Pavlovsk Palace. These they transformed into the finest Neoclassical architectural gems in Europe ( 1976.155.110 ; 2002.115 ).

Koeppe, Wolfram. “Saint Petersburg.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stpt/hd_stpt.htm (October 2003)

Further Reading

Cracraft, James. The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Koeppe, Wolfram, and Marina Nudel. "An Unsuspected Bust of Alexander Menshikov." Metropolitan Museum Journal 35 (2000), pp. 161–77.

Shvidkovsky, Dmitri, and Alexander Orloff. St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars . New York: Abbeville, 1995.

Additional Essays by Wolfram Koeppe

• Koeppe, Wolfram. “ Abraham and David Roentgen .” (June 2013)
• Koeppe, Wolfram. “ Hungarian Silver .” (February 2016)
• Koeppe, Wolfram. “ Collecting for the Kunstkammer .” (October 2002)

Related Essays

• Byzantium (ca. 330–1453)
• Sèvres Porcelain in the Nineteenth Century
• Abraham and David Roentgen
• Antoine Watteau (1684–1721)
• The Decoration of Arms and Armor
• East and West: Chinese Export Porcelain
• Edward Lycett (1833–1910)
• Empire Style, 1800–1815
• European Tapestry Production and Patronage, 1600–1800
• French Porcelain in the Eighteenth Century
• French Silver in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
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Here’s what moms need to know about Project 2025 and how it impacts us all

Scott Olson/Getty

Project 2025 outlines several changes that would greatly impact women and mothers in multiple ways.

By Cassandra Stone August 12, 2024

Throughout the summer, you’ve likely heard the term “Project 2025” pop up regularly in the news and across social media connected to the upcoming presidential election. President Biden, Vice President Harris, and other lawmakers, pundits, and activists have all been referencing the nearly 1,000-page document in recent weeks and warning voters about the potential harm it could cause large portions of the population.

Project 2025 outlines several changes that would greatly impact women and mothers in multiple ways, including access to reproductive care , workplace protections and government assistance requirements.

Here’s what you need to know.

First things first: What is Project 2025?

Essentially, Project 2025 is a 900-page, 30-chapter “Presidential Transition” blueprint developed by over 100 conservative groups and organizations in the United States, primarily led by the Heritage Foundation. It’s designed as a comprehensive plan for implementing conservative policies across the federal government if a Republican president is elected in 2024.

The primary focus of Project 2025 involves a complete overhaul of the federal government—and is drawing significant criticism as a result. Critics argue that the plan represents an extreme ideological agenda that could dramatically alter or dismantle long-standing social programs, environmental protections, and civil rights safeguards. There are also concerns that the proposed changes to agencies like the EPA, Department of Education, and Department of Labor could weaken crucial regulations and protections for workers, students, and the environment.

Additionally, the project’s approach to healthcare reform, including potential changes to Medicare and Medicaid, has raised alarms about reduced access to healthcare for vulnerable populations. This would affect access to prenatal care, postpartum care, and general healthcare for mothers and children.

Another major point of contention is the project’s strategy for rapidly implementing these changes. Critics feel that the speed in which these policies are to be implemented bypasses normal checks and balances and consolidates power. Project 2025 could also lead to a lack of diverse perspectives in policy-making and potentially undermine the independence of federal agencies.

Also, the project’s proposals related to voting rights, immigration, and social programs are seen by many as regressive and potentially discriminatory toward lower-income and birthing populations. Overall, opponents argue that Project 2025 represents a radical departure from established governance norms and could lead to significant social, economic, and political upheaval if implemented.

You can read all about Project 2025 in its entirety here .

View this post on Instagram A post shared by CHAMBER OF MOTHERS (@chamberofmothers)

How do the plans outlined in Project 2025 negatively impact women and mothers?

The biggest key area, arguably, is reproductive rights. The policies outlined call for stricter abortion laws, potentially including a national ban on abortions after a certain gestational age. This could severely limit women’s reproductive choices and access to abortion services—even in cases of medical necessity or pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. Project 2025 also suggests reducing federal funding for family planning services, which could limit access to contraception and reproductive health education.

According to Care.com, nearly two-thirds of American families are spending  at least 20% of their income  on child care. In most states, putting a baby in daycare now costs more than in-state college tuition. The conservatives who authored Project 2025 are clear about childcare: parents are on their own.

“Instead of providing universal daycare,” Project 2025 says  on page 486 , “funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare.” The plan also calls to eliminate the Head Start program, an early education program that would impact more than 750,000 children.

• The project proposes scaling back federal funding for childcare programs, including potential cuts to programs like the Child Care and Development Block Grant.
• It encourages more reliance on private and faith-based childcare providers rather than government-funded programs.
• The plan suggests reducing federal regulations on childcare providers, arguing that this would lower costs and increase availability.
• Instead of direct funding, Project 2025 favors tax credits or deductions to help families afford child care.
• The project advocates for shifting more control over childcare policies to the state level, reducing federal oversight.
• For any remaining federal assistance programs, there may be stricter work requirements for parents to qualify for childcare support.

Project 2025 proposes major changes to programs like Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. These changes could disproportionately affect women, particularly low-income mothers who rely on these programs for prenatal care, postpartum care, and general healthcare for themselves and their children. The project also suggests rolling back certain mandates for insurance coverage of women’s health services, potentially making it more difficult or expensive for women to access essential care.

Chamber of Mothers reports that Project 2025 details plans to eliminate or reduce the few supports pregnant and postpartum people have, including access to mental health services and limiting access to contraceptives.  Project 2025 lays out details to eliminate or reduce reproductive health, including ways to claw back FDA-approval of some drugs and enact a nationwide abortion ban.

It also recommends the following in regard to healthcare:

• That the next secretary of Health and Human Services eliminates the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force established by the Biden Administration before the reversal of Roe v. Wade .
• The creation of a “pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.”
• In a section titled “The Family Agenda,” Project 2025 recommends the Health and Human Services chief should “proudly state that men and women are biological realities,” and that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.”
• It would eliminate access to abortion pills, despite the fact that abortion pills accounted for 63% of  abortions  in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
• Mass data collection on abortions using “every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”

Workplace policies

Project 2025’s proposals could have significant impacts on the workplace if implemented. In addition to the immense childcare restrictions mentioned above, the proposal also seeks to reduce labor regulations, union rights, discrimination protections—including those in place to protect vulnerable pregnant and postpartum workers—wage policies, parental leave, and more.

With a focus on “familial, in-home childcare,” that leaves working mothers with very limited options outside of being ejected from the workforce altogether.

Additionally, Project 2025 does not authorize a federal paid leave mandate, nor does it encourage employers to provide paid leave.  Currently, paid leave proposals have depended on the Social Security Administration or the U.S. Department of Labor to administer the program. 

Project 2025 proposes to reduce the size of these agencies, effectively making it more difficult to create and administer new programs. All of these changes, if enacted, could significantly alter the employer-employee relationship and the overall work environment in many industries.

The proposal includes many reforms to food assistance programs and other support systems that many low-income mothers rely on. It’s important to note that these changes, combined with proposed limitations to early childhood education programs and childcare policies, will place additional financial and logistical burdens on mothers—especially those in lower-income brackets.

What can we do?

While this piece only outlines portions of the entirety of Project 2025’s goals and plans, it’s a thorough education on what could lie ahead for women, mothers and other marginalized groups should the anti-democracy plans come to fruition.

You can visit Chamber of Mothers to see what positions are up for election in your state, and also find out if your voter registration is up-to-date by texting MOTHER to 26797 .

Democracy Forward can also send out ways to mobilize and use your voice to educate and help others.

The American Civil Liberties Union has a petition in place to stop Project 2025. You can add your name here .

The National Urban League also offers a variety of ways to inspire community and civil engagement to stop the policies outlined in Project 2025.

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One of the Most Conservative State Supreme Courts in the Country Just Rebuked Dobbs

The Utah Supreme Court, a body with a clear conservative majority , surprised many observers last week when it handed down a ruling blocking enforcement of the state’s new abortion ban , which criminalizes virtually all abortions from the moment of fertilization . The law, which was set to go into effect in 2022, was blocked by a trial court while the litigation continued, a decision affirmed by the state Supreme Court last week. The Utah decision is not just a reminder that conservative judges faced with the prospect of retention elections may be afraid to gut abortion rights; it also spotlights the chaos and confusion produced by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision undoing a right to choose abortion—and problems with using history and tradition as the only guide to identifying our most cherished rights.

Utah fought the lower court injunction by stressing the kind of argument the U.S. Supreme Court’s supermajority made in reversing Roe v. Wade : arguing that there could be no right to abortion rooted in Utah’s history and tradition because Utah law had long criminalized abortion, and that the rationale of the Dobbs ruling dismantling the federal right to abortion applied here at the state level. The judges of the Utah Supreme Court agreed that the state’s constitution should be interpreted as conservative judges often suggest—in line with “what constitutional language meant to Utahns when it entered the constitution.” But the fact that the state court embraced originalism did not mean that it was ready to let Utah’s ban go into effect.

The relevant question, the court asked, was which broad principles would have been recognized by state residents when the state’s constitution was established. Utahans might not have recognized or even thought about a right to abortion per se, but that was not the point. Looking for too direct an analogue, the court reasoned, was unnecessary or even perverse. “Failure to distinguish between principles and application of those principles,” the court reasoned, “would hold constitutional protections hostage to the prejudices of the 1890s.”

Even the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority seems aware of the problem that Utah’s high court identified. In Rahimi v. United States , the court dodged a potentially disastrous ruling that the Second Amendment made it unconstitutional to deny access to a firearm to someone who posed a credible threat of violence to his partner or minor child. The question was not whether the United States could identify a regulation exactly like the one Zackey Rahimi was challenging; instead, the court would focus on whether the “challenged regulation is consistent with the principles that underpin the Nation’s regulatory tradition.”

The Utah decision shows that the Supreme Court may have assigned itself a sort of Hobson’s choice: binding itself to the biases of the 19 th century or embracing a looser, principle-driven approach that is quite different from the vision of history and tradition the conservative justices have embraced.

The Utah court also highlighted how much the Supreme Court hasn’t told us about how a history-and-tradition test works—and how differently judges can approach it. Dobbs suggests that there can’t be a right to abortion given that states in the 19 th century criminalized abortion (albeit, in some cases, many years after the relevant constitutional provision came into effect). The Utah court thought that it isn’t so simple. The judges tried to account for what regular people, including those who could not vote at the time, thought about which rights were protected. The majority, for example, stressed evidence including a book written by a female doctor about the beliefs and practices of Utah women in the 1890s, and acknowledged that regular Americans might have believed that abortion was moral and even legal before quickening, the point at which fetal movement could be detected, even as criminal laws sometimes eliminated that distinction. There are other unanswered questions too. What is the relationship between originalism or history and tradition—and how much do the conservative justices care about history from after the relevant constitutional provision is put in place? What kinds of evidence count—and from which time periods? Can a court pay attention to those who were marginalized at that time or only those with power in the era to write their views into law?

The Utah decision shows how unstable Dobbs is—and how easy it is for courts to use historical evidence to reach their preferred results. Looking to history and tradition does not absolve judges of responsibility for making decisions that are unpopular or unjust because, as the Utah court recognized, historical analysis allows courts so much flexibility to decide whose history matters and why. It is not the founders who make choices about when and how to look at the past. It is the judges faced with the critical questions of today. Dobbs promised that history would constrain a court that might want to dabble in politics. In truth, as the Utah decision implies , Dobbs treats history as “a type of Rorschach test where we only see what we are already inclined to see .”

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Project 2025 shakes up leadership after criticism from Democrats and Trump, but says work goes on

FILE - Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, speaks at the National Religious Broadcasters convention, Feb. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/George Walker IV, File)

FILE - An American flag is seen upside down at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, May 31, 2024. The conservative think tank that is planning for a complete overhaul of the federal government in the event of a Republican presidential win is suggesting that President Joe Biden might try to hold the White House “by force” if he loses the November election. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

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NEW YORK (AP) — The director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 vision for a complete overhaul of the federal government stepped down Tuesday after blowback from Donald Trump’s campaign, which has tried to disavow the program created by many of the former president’s allies and former aides.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said Paul Dans’ exit comes after the project “completed exactly what it set out to do.” Roberts, who has emerged as a chief spokesman for the effort, plans to lead Project 2025 going forward.

“Our collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue,” Roberts said.

What started as an obscure far-right wish list is now a focal point in the 2024 campaign. Democrats for the past several months have made Project 2025 a key election-year cudgel, pointing to the ultraconservative policy blueprint as a glimpse into how extreme another Trump administration could be.

The nearly 1,000-page handbook lays out sweeping changes in the federal government, including altering personnel rules to ensure government workers are more loyal to the president. Heritage is building a database of potential new hires to staff a second Trump White House.

Yet Trump has repeatedly disavowed the document, saying on social media he hasn’t read it and doesn’t know anything about it. At a rally in Michigan earlier this month, he said Project 2025 was written by people on the “severe right” and some of the things in it are “seriously extreme.”

“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement.

They said, “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.”

But Ohio Sen. JD Vance , Trump’s running mate, wrote a foreword to a forthcoming book by Roberts in which he lauds the Heritage Foundation’s work. A copy of the foreword was obtained by The Associated Press.

“The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump,” wrote Vance.

Quoting Roberts elsewhere in the book, Vance writes: ″We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

Trump campaign representatives did not respond to messages inquiring about whether the campaign asked or pushed for Dans to step down from the project. The Heritage Foundation said Dans left voluntarily and it was not under pressure from the Trump campaign. Dans didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Project 2025 has many ties to Trump’s orbit

In many ways, Project 2025 served as a potential far-right White House in waiting, a constellation of outside groups that would be ready for action if Trump wins a second term.

The project included not only the detailed policy proposals that Trump could put into place on day one at the White House. Project 2025 was also building a personnel database of resumes for potential hires, drawing Americans to Washington to staff a new Trump administration.

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Many Trump allies and former top aides contributed to the project. Dans formerly worked as a personnel official for the Trump administration. And Trump regularly campaigns on many of the same proposals in the Project 2025 book — from mass deportations to upending the Justice Department — though some of its other proposals, including further taxes on tips , conflict with some of what Trump has pledged on the campaign trail.

It was clear that Project 2025 was becoming a liability for Trump and the Republican Party.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign and top Democrats have repeatedly tied Trump to Project 2025 as they argue against a second term for the former president.

The Harris campaign said Project 2025 remains linked to Trump’s agenda, written by his allies for him to “inflict” on the country.

“Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real — in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding,” said Harris for President Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez.

For months Trump’s campaign had warned outside groups, and Heritage in particular, that they did not speak for the former president.

In an interview from the Republican convention first published by Politico, LaCivita said Project 2025 was a problem because “the issues that are going to win us this campaign are not the issues that they want to talk about.”

It was almost certain than Trump’s campaign forced the shakeup, said one former Heritage aide.

Trump’s team was well aware it couldn’t risk any missteps from Heritage in this final stretch ahead of the election.

By announcing the departure, Roberts appeared to be sending a signal to the Trump campaign that changes were being made at Heritage to tamp down any concerns over Project 2025, said another conservative familiar with the situation.

If Trump wins the White House, he almost certainly will need to rely on Heritage and other outside entities to help quickly staff a new administration, the person said.

That person and the former aide would only talk on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Heritage says Project 2025 is not going away

Project 2025’s website will remain live and the group will continue vetting resumes for its nearly 20,000-person database of potential officials eager to execute its vision for government, the Heritage Foundation said Tuesday.

The group said Dans, who had started the project from scratch more than two years ago, will leave the Heritage Foundation in August. Roberts will now run Project 2025 operations.

Roberts has faced criticism in recent weeks after he said on an episode of former Trump aide Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”

Earlier this month, in an interview before beginning a prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena, Bannon mentioned Roberts as the type of leader who could land a top job in a Trump White House.

Mascaro reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here . The AP is solely responsible for all content.

How to cite ChatGPT

Use discount code STYLEBLOG15 for 15% off APA Style print products with free shipping in the United States.

We, the APA Style team, are not robots. We can all pass a CAPTCHA test , and we know our roles in a Turing test . And, like so many nonrobot human beings this year, we’ve spent a fair amount of time reading, learning, and thinking about issues related to large language models, artificial intelligence (AI), AI-generated text, and specifically ChatGPT . We’ve also been gathering opinions and feedback about the use and citation of ChatGPT. Thank you to everyone who has contributed and shared ideas, opinions, research, and feedback.

In this post, I discuss situations where students and researchers use ChatGPT to create text and to facilitate their research, not to write the full text of their paper or manuscript. We know instructors have differing opinions about how or even whether students should use ChatGPT, and we’ll be continuing to collect feedback about instructor and student questions. As always, defer to instructor guidelines when writing student papers. For more about guidelines and policies about student and author use of ChatGPT, see the last section of this post.

Quoting or reproducing the text created by ChatGPT in your paper

If you’ve used ChatGPT or other AI tools in your research, describe how you used the tool in your Method section or in a comparable section of your paper. For literature reviews or other types of essays or response or reaction papers, you might describe how you used the tool in your introduction. In your text, provide the prompt you used and then any portion of the relevant text that was generated in response.

Unfortunately, the results of a ChatGPT “chat” are not retrievable by other readers, and although nonretrievable data or quotations in APA Style papers are usually cited as personal communications , with ChatGPT-generated text there is no person communicating. Quoting ChatGPT’s text from a chat session is therefore more like sharing an algorithm’s output; thus, credit the author of the algorithm with a reference list entry and the corresponding in-text citation.

When prompted with “Is the left brain right brain divide real or a metaphor?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that although the two brain hemispheres are somewhat specialized, “the notation that people can be characterized as ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ is considered to be an oversimplification and a popular myth” (OpenAI, 2023).

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

You may also put the full text of long responses from ChatGPT in an appendix of your paper or in online supplemental materials, so readers have access to the exact text that was generated. It is particularly important to document the exact text created because ChatGPT will generate a unique response in each chat session, even if given the same prompt. If you create appendices or supplemental materials, remember that each should be called out at least once in the body of your APA Style paper.

When given a follow-up prompt of “What is a more accurate representation?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that “different brain regions work together to support various cognitive processes” and “the functional specialization of different regions can change in response to experience and environmental factors” (OpenAI, 2023; see Appendix A for the full transcript).

Creating a reference to ChatGPT or other AI models and software

The in-text citations and references above are adapted from the reference template for software in Section 10.10 of the Publication Manual (American Psychological Association, 2020, Chapter 10). Although here we focus on ChatGPT, because these guidelines are based on the software template, they can be adapted to note the use of other large language models (e.g., Bard), algorithms, and similar software.

The reference and in-text citations for ChatGPT are formatted as follows:

• Parenthetical citation: (OpenAI, 2023)
• Narrative citation: OpenAI (2023)

Let’s break that reference down and look at the four elements (author, date, title, and source):

Author: The author of the model is OpenAI.

Date: The date is the year of the version you used. Following the template in Section 10.10, you need to include only the year, not the exact date. The version number provides the specific date information a reader might need.

Title: The name of the model is “ChatGPT,” so that serves as the title and is italicized in your reference, as shown in the template. Although OpenAI labels unique iterations (i.e., ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-4), they are using “ChatGPT” as the general name of the model, with updates identified with version numbers.

The version number is included after the title in parentheses. The format for the version number in ChatGPT references includes the date because that is how OpenAI is labeling the versions. Different large language models or software might use different version numbering; use the version number in the format the author or publisher provides, which may be a numbering system (e.g., Version 2.0) or other methods.

Bracketed text is used in references for additional descriptions when they are needed to help a reader understand what’s being cited. References for a number of common sources, such as journal articles and books, do not include bracketed descriptions, but things outside of the typical peer-reviewed system often do. In the case of a reference for ChatGPT, provide the descriptor “Large language model” in square brackets. OpenAI describes ChatGPT-4 as a “large multimodal model,” so that description may be provided instead if you are using ChatGPT-4. Later versions and software or models from other companies may need different descriptions, based on how the publishers describe the model. The goal of the bracketed text is to briefly describe the kind of model to your reader.

Source: When the publisher name and the author name are the same, do not repeat the publisher name in the source element of the reference, and move directly to the URL. This is the case for ChatGPT. The URL for ChatGPT is https://chat.openai.com/chat . For other models or products for which you may create a reference, use the URL that links as directly as possible to the source (i.e., the page where you can access the model, not the publisher’s homepage).

Other questions about citing ChatGPT

You may have noticed the confidence with which ChatGPT described the ideas of brain lateralization and how the brain operates, without citing any sources. I asked for a list of sources to support those claims and ChatGPT provided five references—four of which I was able to find online. The fifth does not seem to be a real article; the digital object identifier given for that reference belongs to a different article, and I was not able to find any article with the authors, date, title, and source details that ChatGPT provided. Authors using ChatGPT or similar AI tools for research should consider making this scrutiny of the primary sources a standard process. If the sources are real, accurate, and relevant, it may be better to read those original sources to learn from that research and paraphrase or quote from those articles, as applicable, than to use the model’s interpretation of them.

We’ve also received a number of other questions about ChatGPT. Should students be allowed to use it? What guidelines should instructors create for students using AI? Does using AI-generated text constitute plagiarism? Should authors who use ChatGPT credit ChatGPT or OpenAI in their byline? What are the copyright implications ?

On these questions, researchers, editors, instructors, and others are actively debating and creating parameters and guidelines. Many of you have sent us feedback, and we encourage you to continue to do so in the comments below. We will also study the policies and procedures being established by instructors, publishers, and academic institutions, with a goal of creating guidelines that reflect the many real-world applications of AI-generated text.

For questions about manuscript byline credit, plagiarism, and related ChatGPT and AI topics, the APA Style team is seeking the recommendations of APA Journals editors. APA Style guidelines based on those recommendations will be posted on this blog and on the APA Style site later this year.

Update: APA Journals has published policies on the use of generative AI in scholarly materials .

We, the APA Style team humans, appreciate your patience as we navigate these unique challenges and new ways of thinking about how authors, researchers, and students learn, write, and work with new technologies.

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

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It’s often been said that the only constant in life—and in business—is change. And while this can be unsettling for companies, change has consistently led to growth for the management consulting industry. Whether companies are seeking to downsize, expand, rebrand or enhance AI capabilities, businesses often need help from external advisors, particularly those with highly technical skills or niche expertise. As a result, consultants have never been busier.

Alicia Pittman, managing director, senior partner and global people chair at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), says that many businesses coming out of turbulent times post pandemic are seeking large-scale change. “A lot of clients are looking soup to nuts, and asking, ‘How do we accelerate this company to the next chapter?’”

The answer, according to Pittman, is to join forces with the right consulting team. In the case of BCG, when their consultants take on a project, they don’t just drop in, make some fixes and leave. Rather, the consultants take time listening to the needs of their clients, customizing strategies together, and guiding executives and staff on how to implement them. BCG’s philosophy, says Pittman: “We don’t work on clients, we work with clients.”

This approach has apparently served BCG well; for the third straight year it ranked as one of the most recommended firms in our list of the World’s Best Management Consulting Firms . The ranking, created in partnership with market research firm Statista , is based on three national surveys of consultants (partners and managers at consulting firms) and clients (executives) in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany; as well as a global survey of 8,500 consultants and clients in 29 countries across all continents.

Survey respondents were asked which consulting firms they would recommend within 13 industries (such as construction and healthcare) and 14 functional areas (such as digital transformation and organization management), for a total of 27 categories; those with the most recommendations were included in our list and awarded a star rating. Firms in the top 10% (very frequently recommended) received 5 stars, firms between the top 10% and 40% (frequently recommended) received 4 stars, and all others with a sufficient number of recommendations received 3 stars.

In addition to the consulting firms, survey respondents were also able to recommend consulting networks, which aggregate large numbers of independent consultants and facilitate their connection with potential clients. Consulting networks were rated using the same method used to rate consulting firms.

Ultimately, a total of 224 management consulting firms and nine consulting networks made this third annual list. (For more on the methodology, see below.)

Eight firms on our list earned stars in all 27 categories, and they were the same top performers as last year. But this year, Accenture led that pack—bumping McKinsey & Company from the head of the list—with Accenture receiving 26 5-star ratings and one 4-star rating, while McKinsey received 24 5-star ratings and three 4-star ratings. For the second year in a row, Deloitte earned 25 5-star ratings and two 4-star ratings. The other five firms that received stars in all 27 categories (specifically, 4- and 5-star ratings) were Boston Consulting Group (BCG) , Bain & Company , KPMG , PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and EY .

One of the top priorities for clients across every industry this year, says Muqsit Ashraf, group chief executive of Accenture Strategy, is to reinvent their organization’s generative AI, “impacting everyone from the C-suite to frontline workers.” To do this, Accenture teams advise companies on “building a digital core, transforming processes end to end, rethinking talent strategies, embedding responsible AI principles, and developing change management capabilities,” he says.

Deloitte's global headquarters in London, England

Another major focus for businesses around the world is sustainability, says Tamzen Isacsson, CEO of the Management Consultancies Association , a trade organization in the UK. Thus, consulting firms are not only guiding clients on sustainable strategies for their businesses, the consultants themselves are also walking the (carbon-free) walk. “The consulting industry previously had a big carbon footprint in terms of travel,” says Isacsson. Post pandemic, however, consultants have radically revamped the way they work with clients, often traveling much less and instead offering a blend of remote time and face-to-face time.

New norms for remote and digital work arrangements have also made it easier for businesses to work with expert consultants in any country—and there are a growing number of consulting networks facilitating these connections. One such network, Malt—which received high marks in our rankings—has built an online community of more than 500,000 freelance consultants and more than 70,000 clients. The AI-powered platform serves as a matchmaker of sorts, allowing consultants to find projects that suit their skills and interests while offering clients the ability to find consultants with the specific expertise needed.

Malt , which operates in eight countries in Europe and the United Arab Emirates, vets the freelancers, makes sure they are compliant with tax regulations and certified to work where the client is located, and provides tools that help both consultants and clients find matches. Pascal Schäfer, Malt’s head of freelance community and project partnering, says that clients usually come to the platform knowing exactly what they are looking for, and it’s often a consultant with very specific expertise that most companies would not employ on staff. “We can help them to find someone with exactly that skillset or that combination of experience in the country they need,” he says.

“The platform suggests potential candidates based on their experience and hard skills but then we add the human touch,” says Schäfer, noting that Malt proposes three to five candidates to the client—also considering interpersonal skills and price—and the client can choose which candidates they’d like to meet. Malt arranges a call for both parties to talk on their own or with a Malt advisor. When a match is made, clients then hire and pay the consultant through the platform, providing security and stability for all involved.

For executives in search of their own great match—whether through a consulting network, a boutique consulting company or a multinational firm— click here for the full list of the World’s Best Consulting Firms .

Methodology

The World’s Best Consulting Firms 2024, created in partnership with market research firm Statista , is based on three national surveys of consultants (partners and managers at consulting firms) and clients (executives) in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany; as well as a global survey of 8,500 consultants and clients in 29 countries across all continents. Survey respondents were asked which consulting firms they would recommend; firms were eligible if they had active offices in at least three of the following regions: Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania, Europe, the Middle East, North America and South America.

The firms were recommended within 13 industries (such as technology, financial services and healthcare) and 14 functional areas (such as M&A, marketing and sustainability); those with the most recommendations were included in our list and awarded a star rating. Firms in the top 10% (very frequently recommended) received 5 stars, firms between the top 10% and 40% (frequently recommended) received 4 stars, and all others with a sufficient number of recommendations received 3 stars.

In addition to the consulting firms, survey respondents were also able to recommend consulting networks, which aggregate large numbers of independent consultants and facilitate their connection with potential clients. The networks enable consultants to match with projects that suit their skills and interests, while affording clients the ability to match with consultants offering the specific expertise needed. For this list, the method used to rate consulting firms was also used to rate consulting networks.

Ultimately, a total of 224 management consulting firms and nine consulting networks made the list.

As with all Forbes lists, companies pay no fee to participate or be selected. To read more about how we make these lists , click here. For questions about this list, please email listdesk [at] forbes.com.

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Who Are the Far-Right Groups Behind the U.K. Riots?

After a deadly stabbing at a children’s event in northwestern England, an array of online influencers, anti-Muslim extremists and fascist groups have stoked unrest, experts say.

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By Esther Bintliff and Eve Sampson

Esther Bintliff reported from London, and Eve Sampson from New York.

Violent unrest has erupted in several towns and cities in Britain in recent days, and further disorder broke out on Saturday as far-right agitators gathered in demonstrations around the country.

The violence has been driven by online disinformation and extremist right-wing groups intent on creating disorder after a deadly knife attack on a children’s event in northwestern England, experts said.

A range of far-right factions and individuals, including neo-Nazis, violent soccer fans and anti-Muslim campaigners, have promoted and taken part in the unrest, which has also been stoked by online influencers .

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed to deploy additional police officers to crack down on the disorder. “This is not a protest that has got out of hand,” he said on Thursday. “It is a group of individuals who are absolutely bent on violence.”

Here is what we know about the unrest and some of those involved.

Where have riots taken place?

The first riot took place on Tuesday evening in Southport, a town in northwestern England, after a deadly stabbing attack the previous day at a children’s dance and yoga class. Three girls died of their injuries, and eight other children and two adults were wounded.

The suspect, Axel Rudakubana , was born in Britain, but in the hours after the attack, disinformation about his identity — including the false claim that he was an undocumented migrant — spread rapidly online . Far-right activists used messaging apps including Telegram and X to urge people to take to the streets.

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Trump's Agenda47 on education: Abolish teacher tenure, universal school choice, patriotism

With former teacher Gov. Tim Walz rounding out the Democratic ticket, education could become a talking point in this election.

Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump has laid out his education policy plans in Agenda47 . Separate from the oft-mentioned Project 2025 , Agenda47 covers Trump's official policy platform on issues including crime, health care and immigration. Agenda47 on education proposes 10 ideas for "great schools leading to great jobs" that range from curriculum requirements to preferential funding for schools with internship programs.

This election comes at a pivotal time for educators, says Jon Valant, director at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. Between the pandemic and the culture wars, teachers have had a rough few years and he says Trump's proposals are unlikely to alleviate the core of those issues.

"All of these are politics more than policy," Valant said in an interview. "My worry is distraction, these types of proposals... they're averting people's eyes from what we should actually be talking about."

The National Education Association , the largest teachers' union in the U.S., has thrown its support behind Vice President Kamala Harris and Walz. NEA President Becky Pringle said Trump's agenda is rooted in his time in office, appointing Betsy DeVos as Education secretary . Pringle said she hopes for an administration that will help teachers get more resources and respect to alleviate the teacher shortage.

"When I started teaching many years ago... I didn't really have a clue every decision that was made about my kids, my classroom, my colleagues, was made by someone who was elected or appointed to some position of power," Pringle said, explaining that they want more educators in public office. "We will have an educator in the White House."

Here are some of Trump's proposed education policies that impact teachers and school systems, as quoted in Agenda47:

Tim Walz career timeline: From high school teacher to Kamala Harris' vice-presidential pick

Give preference to schools that abolish teacher tenure

"To reward good teachers, President Trump will  implement  funding preferences and favorable treatment for states and school districts that abolish teacher tenure for grades K-12, adopt Merit Pay to reward good teachers and give parents the right to vote for the principals who direct their children’s education."

◾ How we got here: Valant called this proposal "an oldie but a goodie for conservative education reform," as it tends to be popular among conservatives. About a decade ago, several states sought to reform teacher tenure by extending the probationary period, but in recent years the push has been more muted as other education battles took the forefront.

◾ In today's context: Valant said union politics come into play here, as teachers unions want to protect tenure as a way to defend against unfounded firings. "This one is primarily the... direct shot at teachers unions," Valant said. He also said teacher recruitment and retention after the last few years is already under stress, and he worries taking away tenure could exacerbate that.

Universal school choice

"President Trump supports universal school choice so that parents can send their children to the public, private, or religious school that best suits their needs, their goals, and their values... President Trump commends Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia for leading the American school choice revolution – and he looks forward to working with other states, as well as the U.S. Congress, to provide for universal school choice for every American family."

◾ How we got here: School choice can include a range of policies that give parents the ability to use public money for private school tuition or homeschooling. Valant said there was once bipartisan agreement on limited school choice policies that allowed for charter schools. But more expansive school choice policies, like providing vouchers that give money to parents for their kids to attend private school, dramatically expanded in the last few years. According to Education Week, proponents of school choice say it helps provide another option for kids in underperforming schools.

◾ In today's context: Many outcomes of expanding school choice policies have yet to be seen. But Valant said vouchers are often not enough to cover tuition costs for private schools, and as a result they mostly end up helping relatively wealthy families, many of whom already have kids in private school. He said it could also change the landscape of school enrollment if wealthy kids end up in private schools and low-income kids end up in public schools. "To me...it feels like incredible risk for the damage they may do to their public education systems."

Create a credentialing body to certify patriotic teachers

"President Trump will reinstate the  1776 Commission , which he originally created but was disbanded by Joe Biden on his first day in office, to ensure America’s children learn the truth about their country’s history and the timeless principles of liberty and equality... President Trump will  veto  any effort to weaponize or nationalize civics education. And he will create a credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values and support the American Way of Life."

◾ How we got here: Trump created the 1776 Commission in November of 2020 as part of the backlash to the New York Times' 1619 Project, which examines the history of slavery in the U.S. That backlash also included conservatives passing "critical race theory" curriculum bans, as a key part of the erupting culture wars. The report the commission produced days before Trump left office excused America's history of slavery and undercut the legacy of the civil rights movement.

◾ In today's context: Political messaging on critical race theory and history curriculums seems to have waned in the last year. Valant said creating a new credentialing body would be politically driven, yet derails from traditional conservative values of stripping down government regulation.

Pringle also said this type of body would be politically driven, and this credentialing body could be made up of unqualified appointees.

"They don't know what our kids need, they haven't trained to be able to teach the diverse learning needs and the skills and meet kids where they are, let alone the preparation of educators," Pringle said. "So we know that anything he does has a political nature to it."

Contributing: Kayla Jimenez, Matthew Brown