Tasks and works at university involve some group work. (50% of the work in my course was group work.) Teamwork skill is considered important even for jobs. Hence, this blog is for you to know how to collaborate with classmates in group work effectively, specifically at university. 

List of Contents

• Set Rules
• Asking Classmates
• Work Distribution

Set Rules

Deciding regulations within a group will be very helpful later on when you want to reduce your stress and when you determine the contribution rate for each person before submitting the group work. By setting rules, every teammate can know how each can contribute to the work. The rules may include things that you think are common sense as well because there are students from very different backgrounds and the sense is sometimes different depending on the student. For example, the rules can be informing group mates when you will be late or have to leave within an hour, finishing each assigned task before the next meeting, role assignment (described in this blog below), the standards of work quality (i.e. check if there is no plagiarism before putting the work in a group folder), how to help each other, and more. This might sound too official, however this will also prevent having an imbalanced workload.

Communication

In the experience of my group work, students sometimes argue about their work within a group because everyone is dedicated to their work (there are different reasons as well). Even most of the time deep talking will help the group work better in the future, it can be stressful to even see the argument sometimes. In order to prevent having such a tough time, the thing you can do is not to project what the teammate is thinking. That is because people sometimes assume why the person does the behaviour in a negative way even when there is a positive reasoning behind it. Therefore, if you find something starting to bother you during a period of group work, it can be effective for students to ask before projecting others’ thoughts in order to understand the person before anything.

Work Distribution

As mentioned in the previous section, deciding the distribution of work helps students to prevent unintentional overwork or less work. Here are the precise work distribution examples of a report assignment within a group:

• Report sections 1, 2, 3…
• Submission
• Create a digital group folder
• Create a contribution sheet
• Finalise the format of the report
• Etc…

Deciding distributions of side work (e.g. submission and format organisation) as well as actual work (i.e. writing report) beforehand will greatly help each student be comfortable with what the person does (i.e. the assigned work) as they do not have to decide who does what task every time.

Thank you very much for reading this far. I hope you will have a lovely day.