The Cupped Hand and Finding a Balance of Group work

 For better or for worse, group work can be extremely productive or a waste of time, in part because there is an imbalance within the classroom, as the articles for this week claim, and because the teacher has to temper his/her involvement within the group. Students, it’s no surprise, come from different backgrounds; this is particularly true of college classes where age and experience are a factor.  The problem is how to get these different students, these different “chefs,” as Roskelly calls them, to work together in the discourse kitchen.  

One of Roskelly’s metaphors for learning is the “cupped hand,” or a writer’s need to hold on to their writing and ideas(the opposite of the “open palm”).  Roskelly on the assumption of why group work fails:“School, we’ve determined, is competitive, not cooperative, and therefore it’s the individual not the group effort that counts…The fact is we assume that effort can only be measure by a grade and that a grade can’t fairly be given to a group. So attempts to work as a group seem futile and unnecessary given what we’ve assumed school is all about-keeping not sharing, winning not collaborating, cupping the hand, not opening the palm.” 

Reading this, I thought “Dammit, I used to do this a lot.” In classes I would write down any ideas or comments I thought were interesting, horde them like a squirrel, thinking “no one else has said this, so its unique and something I could possibly use in a paper,” only to have someone else contribute the same idea moments later. I would sometimes “piggy back” on the idea. My point: I had to see the entire class as a group, regardless if we were separated into groups of 3 or 7.   

 I think this is something that would be useful: when I read these articles, I was reminded of  a TED talk on group work and collaboration in schools and in the workforce and how societies view the creativity of extroverts and introverts.