The other day my friend and I were talking about the pros and cons of group work and individual work. We think individual work helps students to form the self-learning habit and makes students more independent. We think group work can be efficient and creative. And group work force students to learn how to work as a team.
However, it has to based on the fact that all the group members are willing to participate in the discussion and finish the assigned work on time. In the reality, students hate group work. This is because usually there will be someone who never joins the discussion meeting and delays the appointed work. Under such circumstance, team work is dead. Those who still need the grade and want to hand in the report will ignore the lazy ones and do all the work. Hence, most of the time, group work become half-group work. Furthermore, those who do nothing can still have their names on the group list. This is unfair. I think students should urge their group members to work hard.
On the other hand, individual work is an opportunity for students to become independent because each of them has to do all the works. They have to brainstorming, collect and analyze data, and then present the information with their own words. Meanwhile, individual work can be less creative because usually they won't share their thoughts with others.
I believe that when teacher asks students to work as a group is out of good will because the project is huge and needed different point of views to solve the problem. However, I think there are many aspects need to improve when taking group work in practice.
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There is a saying says that “haste makes waste.” I'm quite agree with the statement. I believe that quality work comes from time and effort. Take myself as an example, last semester I spent couple weeks to finish a project and I received a good grade for the project. In the contrast, my three-hour work was messy and received a relatively low grade. In addition to grades, sufficient time enables me to think carefully toward my work. From time to time I can spare some time to look at my ideas again and come up with more specific and complete thoughts. What's more, when I have enough time to gather more data, journals and articles, I can grab more different opinions toward the issue and compare different point of views. This helps me with my work too.
However, I think todays college students are not good at time management. They are busying with part-time jobs, having fun and others. Under such circumstances, they might not have much time to focus on their works but being distracted. Recently I found out that more and more students (including myself) tend to procrastinate their works until the day before deadline. Hence, usually I can see my friends still working on their journals, papers, and reports at around two in the morning.
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This semester I work as a teacher assistant in professional speaking class for the English elite program. My job is to encourage and provoke students to talk and rephrase their speech. At first I thought it would be an easy job with nice pay. But I was wrong.
To meet the requirement from the teacher, I have to meet my students for an hour every other week to preview our textbook and make sure that they are well-prepared to deliver short speeches in class. After several times of meeting with my students, I discovered that it is not as easy as I thought to urge them to talk. Usually they are shy and afraid of making mistakes, and they have less vocabulary to express themselves. Though compare to other students they are more aggressive-learners, the poor sentence structures and poor grammar really make me headache.
At first, I followed the instructions from our teacher to interact with my students. But later on I found out that they are not really interested in those topics in the textbook and their learning is limited because of the textbook. Hence, last week I tried a different way of teaching: I threw the textbook away and declared that we can have a free talk on anything they are interested in. We talked about baseball games, computer games, issues around campus and relationships between men and women. The feedback was quite good: they love the “free-talk” style and they think that through free-talk, they can acquire more vocabulary then merely study our textbook. I think this is a big progress on my way of working as a TA and I'll continue to work hard on TA's work.
