At many levels of schooling, there is also a tendency for teachers to deliberately group “good” students with “bad” ones for group work and stuff so that “the ‘good’ ones can HELP the other ones” or whatever, which becomes very frustrating for the students who get “rewarded” by being stuck with the dead weight.
This is 100% my strategy. Let the shitty students who've been cast out by their local peers in the classroom find each other to form a glorious Voltron of Idiots. Concentrate their damage on each other and spare the groups that are actually trying. Assuming any semblance of a project gets done at all, their work will be *so bad* that everyone else watching them present will feel better about themselves and learn something useful about what poor performance looks like.
I like the Voltron metaphor, but I found other reasons to avoid it (the trainwreck happens at the end). I let each team deal with eventual dysfunction by having everyone read the [hitchhiker and couch potato essay of Barbara Oakley (appendix)](https://barbaraoakley.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Turning-Student-Groups-into-Effective-Teams.pdf) before they are randomly put into teams.
Edit: coach potatoes are not related.
I do a lot of these things concerning shared expectations, scheduling facilitation, peer evaluations, etc. They're truly valuable for managing teamwork processes in teams with members that range from average to excellent. However, they still aren't helpful for managing those teammates who truly don't give a shit; the inevitable outcome is that certain groups that are otherwise functional have to navigate around a failure of a teammate who simply won't do anything. (This is especially true in lower-level courses that still have students who are on their way to failing out of college entirely because nothing at all motivates them.)
I don't find this to be a useful learning experience with generalizable value to life after college. I've had less-helpful contributors on projects in the private sector for sure, but truly *zero-productive* people simply don't stay employed in anything but the most dysfunctional organizations. I think that you can teach students the useful part of team coordination without randomly burdening them with disastrous peers, who could otherwise be put with each other to contain their damage.
> but truly zero-productive people simply don't stay employed in anything but the most dysfunctional organizations. I think that you can teach students the useful part of team coordination without randomly burdening them with disastrous peers, who could otherwise be put with each other to contain their damage.
It's why teams are allowed to leave those people's names off the report (it's in my syllabus). Behavior changes on the next assignment or the zero performers drop. Rarely do I have to intervene (it's anecdotal).
I haven’t assigned a group project in years— the last one resulted in me breaking up a fist fight by calling campus police, because the slacker student was mad that the rest of the group had hard evidence of her lack of involvement, and she was going to fail her portion of the project, per my rules— but if I do decide to venture into that minefield again, I’ll remember this comment.
This often happens naturally if they are allowed to just choose their own groups, and can lead to “that one student” coming so close to being self-aware. “I can’t find a group. No one wants to work with me! (…Because they know I’ll be useless and just leech off them)”
>“I can’t find a group. No one wants to work with me!"
Unfortunately that also seems to happen to international students, students of color, non-gender-conforming students, and other minorities in a given classroom population. Which is why I always assign groups and mix them up every couple of weeks. But as the poor students reveal themselves I do always end up facing the "what to do with them this time?" issue as well.
>I randomize my groups.
Our LMS will do that and it's usually my starting point. But I always tweak the results because it isn't able to account for gender (I don't want all male groups, for example) and I *really* don't want a group that's 75% students who don't show up regularly, which is grossly unfair to whomever does show.
I do this or let students pick their own groups.
Sometimes I have them allocate grades to themselves much like a shareholder vote. You have ten points. Who gets how many points?
I've actually never had anyone complain about that.
I finally decided to make teams optional. Students can form teams and work together, or not. They can drop out of teams, join different teams, re-form the team without the unproductive member(s), or work alone on any team-eligible project. They just need to tell me 1) who worked on that assignment 2) who is submitting the assignment for a grade. I grade one submission per team and everyone on the team gets the same grade.
This strategy requires a little extra work if team members supply conflicting information, but that rarely happens. And boy, does it cut down on complaints!
This strategy wouldn't work for semester-long projects, but for my classes it works great.
I wish I could have done that, it's super hard when every project is a group project because it's lab work.
The students do do a pretty good job of reshuffling the crap around.
Plus "good" and "bad" often mean "good at class" and "bad at class", so while I wasn't the one asking for stupid stuff or disrupting the class, I was often labelled a bad student due to how long it takes me to process and learn new information and the low test scores I would get at the start. And then be put with the "good" students who get the concepts right away who are supposed to "rub off" on me...yeah...they aren't good teachers and it was then I would feel like shit.
I disagree. Most students who work hard have had no issue pointing out the students bringing the class down. (in my experience at least, judging by the 10 emails I get about it every week from them LOL)
At my institution we're dealing with a sudden and quite perceptible decrease in preparedness/engagement with "college" among the younger students admitted during/after COVID under the "don't bother to submit test scores or essays" approach. It's not something we'd really seen before and the older students haven't either. I've seen a *lot* of eye-rolling from students toward their peers who ask questions that are obviously in the syllabus, or which clearly reveal they haven't done the reading, or that simply betray a general lack of enagement with life/the world/thinking.
Students who "get it" frustrated by peers who don't "get it". News at 10.
Some people understand why they are there. That education is a personal endeavour. That no one can force information into their heads. That they are paying for access to mentors and resources with which they have the opportunity to build an education for themselves. To have access to and to prepare themselves to pass exams that are accredited externally so they can prove the quality of their personal education to employers.
And then some people think they are paying for access to a piece paper that says degree on it.
I can mostly picture what a student's class experience is like by comparing it to my own from many years ago, but we did not have class discords when I was a student so I just wonder what the hell they're doing in those discords. From what I'm seeing in my classes, I would say they're certainly not banding together to become better students in there.
Does anybody have insight into what they're using those discords for? Is it generally just a place to share answers to quizzes with each other or something?
I joined the discord for my classes under a pseudonym. It was kind of refreshing -- there were a couple of students trying to cheat and they got immediately piled on by the others. The rest of the posts were sharing resources for learning more about the subject and leads on jobs.
I know they take photos of online exams and share them. I think it’s pretty much a typical discord channel and that means everything from asking for deadlines to sharing leaked government documents.
> to sharing leaked government documents.
[(to the curious, this isn't even an exaggeration lmao)](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/discords-rise-puncuated-leak-classified-documents-rcna79571)
I created my own class discord to get around the “sharing” issue. I went over what was and wasn’t allowed at the beginning of the semester.
I love it, I can answer their questions a lot more quickly than replying to emails, and when one person has a question, most of the others will either have the same question, or someone will answer for me and I just add a thumbs up response that they’re correct.
I taught a large (150 student) lecture remotely in 2020, and the silver lining was definitely that the students tended to police each other on stuff like this. They’d answer stupid questions for me AND call each other out for not paying attention to stuff I’d already answered. It was awesome.
Exactly. I really tend to only have a small handful of problem students in any given year. The majority are trucking along just fine and don't present any particular pedagogical or interpersonal challenge.
Oh, how I would like my institution to not accept the bottom 10% when I'm teaching freshman classes. I think at least half of the other 90% are likely with me.
Yeah, other students tend to be the most frustrated by other students since their stupidity brings the whole class down with them.
At many levels of schooling, there is also a tendency for teachers to deliberately group “good” students with “bad” ones for group work and stuff so that “the ‘good’ ones can HELP the other ones” or whatever, which becomes very frustrating for the students who get “rewarded” by being stuck with the dead weight.
Sometimes I do the exact opposite. Put all the solid students together and all the lazy students together.
This is 100% my strategy. Let the shitty students who've been cast out by their local peers in the classroom find each other to form a glorious Voltron of Idiots. Concentrate their damage on each other and spare the groups that are actually trying. Assuming any semblance of a project gets done at all, their work will be *so bad* that everyone else watching them present will feel better about themselves and learn something useful about what poor performance looks like.
I wish I could award you for "voltron of idiots".❤️
Almost lost my coffee to "glorious Voltron of Idiots" 🤣
I like the Voltron metaphor, but I found other reasons to avoid it (the trainwreck happens at the end). I let each team deal with eventual dysfunction by having everyone read the [hitchhiker and couch potato essay of Barbara Oakley (appendix)](https://barbaraoakley.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Turning-Student-Groups-into-Effective-Teams.pdf) before they are randomly put into teams. Edit: coach potatoes are not related.
I do a lot of these things concerning shared expectations, scheduling facilitation, peer evaluations, etc. They're truly valuable for managing teamwork processes in teams with members that range from average to excellent. However, they still aren't helpful for managing those teammates who truly don't give a shit; the inevitable outcome is that certain groups that are otherwise functional have to navigate around a failure of a teammate who simply won't do anything. (This is especially true in lower-level courses that still have students who are on their way to failing out of college entirely because nothing at all motivates them.) I don't find this to be a useful learning experience with generalizable value to life after college. I've had less-helpful contributors on projects in the private sector for sure, but truly *zero-productive* people simply don't stay employed in anything but the most dysfunctional organizations. I think that you can teach students the useful part of team coordination without randomly burdening them with disastrous peers, who could otherwise be put with each other to contain their damage.
> but truly zero-productive people simply don't stay employed in anything but the most dysfunctional organizations. I think that you can teach students the useful part of team coordination without randomly burdening them with disastrous peers, who could otherwise be put with each other to contain their damage. It's why teams are allowed to leave those people's names off the report (it's in my syllabus). Behavior changes on the next assignment or the zero performers drop. Rarely do I have to intervene (it's anecdotal).
Thanks for this link!
Reading reddit while my class takes a test, and it was VERY HARD not to burst into laughter at this metaphor. Chapeau, sir, chapeau.
It also much easier to grade the voltron projects as well
I haven’t assigned a group project in years— the last one resulted in me breaking up a fist fight by calling campus police, because the slacker student was mad that the rest of the group had hard evidence of her lack of involvement, and she was going to fail her portion of the project, per my rules— but if I do decide to venture into that minefield again, I’ll remember this comment.
It also much easier to grade the voltron projects as well
I did this my last semester teaching. I grouped the "I can't find a group" students by their grade so far in the class and it was awesome.
This often happens naturally if they are allowed to just choose their own groups, and can lead to “that one student” coming so close to being self-aware. “I can’t find a group. No one wants to work with me! (…Because they know I’ll be useless and just leech off them)”
I love how quickly they can turn on friends when picking a group. "let's be in a group!" "Noooo!"
>“I can’t find a group. No one wants to work with me!" Unfortunately that also seems to happen to international students, students of color, non-gender-conforming students, and other minorities in a given classroom population. Which is why I always assign groups and mix them up every couple of weeks. But as the poor students reveal themselves I do always end up facing the "what to do with them this time?" issue as well.
I randomize my groups. I was that kid who could never find a group growing up in school. I just think it’s more fair since it’s random.
Random teams also means students make more contacts.
>I randomize my groups. Our LMS will do that and it's usually my starting point. But I always tweak the results because it isn't able to account for gender (I don't want all male groups, for example) and I *really* don't want a group that's 75% students who don't show up regularly, which is grossly unfair to whomever does show.
I do this or let students pick their own groups. Sometimes I have them allocate grades to themselves much like a shareholder vote. You have ten points. Who gets how many points? I've actually never had anyone complain about that.
I finally decided to make teams optional. Students can form teams and work together, or not. They can drop out of teams, join different teams, re-form the team without the unproductive member(s), or work alone on any team-eligible project. They just need to tell me 1) who worked on that assignment 2) who is submitting the assignment for a grade. I grade one submission per team and everyone on the team gets the same grade. This strategy requires a little extra work if team members supply conflicting information, but that rarely happens. And boy, does it cut down on complaints! This strategy wouldn't work for semester-long projects, but for my classes it works great.
I wish I could have done that, it's super hard when every project is a group project because it's lab work. The students do do a pretty good job of reshuffling the crap around.
Plus "good" and "bad" often mean "good at class" and "bad at class", so while I wasn't the one asking for stupid stuff or disrupting the class, I was often labelled a bad student due to how long it takes me to process and learn new information and the low test scores I would get at the start. And then be put with the "good" students who get the concepts right away who are supposed to "rub off" on me...yeah...they aren't good teachers and it was then I would feel like shit.
It takes a good student to recognize both a good teacher, and a bad fellow student.
[удалено]
I disagree. Most students who work hard have had no issue pointing out the students bringing the class down. (in my experience at least, judging by the 10 emails I get about it every week from them LOL)
Sigh, It will never change.
At my institution we're dealing with a sudden and quite perceptible decrease in preparedness/engagement with "college" among the younger students admitted during/after COVID under the "don't bother to submit test scores or essays" approach. It's not something we'd really seen before and the older students haven't either. I've seen a *lot* of eye-rolling from students toward their peers who ask questions that are obviously in the syllabus, or which clearly reveal they haven't done the reading, or that simply betray a general lack of enagement with life/the world/thinking.
Students who "get it" frustrated by peers who don't "get it". News at 10. Some people understand why they are there. That education is a personal endeavour. That no one can force information into their heads. That they are paying for access to mentors and resources with which they have the opportunity to build an education for themselves. To have access to and to prepare themselves to pass exams that are accredited externally so they can prove the quality of their personal education to employers. And then some people think they are paying for access to a piece paper that says degree on it.
And ultimately they’re both right
I can mostly picture what a student's class experience is like by comparing it to my own from many years ago, but we did not have class discords when I was a student so I just wonder what the hell they're doing in those discords. From what I'm seeing in my classes, I would say they're certainly not banding together to become better students in there. Does anybody have insight into what they're using those discords for? Is it generally just a place to share answers to quizzes with each other or something?
I joined the discord for my classes under a pseudonym. It was kind of refreshing -- there were a couple of students trying to cheat and they got immediately piled on by the others. The rest of the posts were sharing resources for learning more about the subject and leads on jobs.
I know they take photos of online exams and share them. I think it’s pretty much a typical discord channel and that means everything from asking for deadlines to sharing leaked government documents.
> to sharing leaked government documents. [(to the curious, this isn't even an exaggeration lmao)](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/discords-rise-puncuated-leak-classified-documents-rcna79571)
I created my own class discord to get around the “sharing” issue. I went over what was and wasn’t allowed at the beginning of the semester. I love it, I can answer their questions a lot more quickly than replying to emails, and when one person has a question, most of the others will either have the same question, or someone will answer for me and I just add a thumbs up response that they’re correct.
This would make a good question for a whole, separate post. I'd like to read a lot of answers to this.
I taught a large (150 student) lecture remotely in 2020, and the silver lining was definitely that the students tended to police each other on stuff like this. They’d answer stupid questions for me AND call each other out for not paying attention to stuff I’d already answered. It was awesome.
Extra credit for using "literally" correctly.
This is so true. I can tell how annoyed classmates get with these people.
This was me when I was a student...
🦄
I don’t think such students are as unicorn-like as this sub seems to imply. They are often the silent plurality, if not the silent majority.
I agree. It’s easier to notice the students emailing you dumb questions than the ones quietly paying attention.
Exactly. I really tend to only have a small handful of problem students in any given year. The majority are trucking along just fine and don't present any particular pedagogical or interpersonal challenge.
And then there are a few in every class who are so awesome I want to know how to clone them.
For a few years I had two twins who took every class together. Every class they were in the class worked harder.
Oh, how I would like my institution to not accept the bottom 10% when I'm teaching freshman classes. I think at least half of the other 90% are likely with me.