When doing group projects, not everyone is an equal

"Nothing of significance was ever achieved by an individual acting alone. Look below the surface and you will find that all seemingly solo acts are really team efforts."

- John C. Maxwell in "The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork"

Yeah, yeah, I got that. I totally understand that group projects are good for accomplishing great things. Charles Lindbergh would never have made his solo flight across the Atlantic without that group of nine St. Louis businessmen backing him up. Clara Barton wouldn't have been able to save many soldiers had she been running around a battlefield all by herself. Even Michael Jordan could not possibly have won those world championships if he had to play basketball one on five.

The next time I have a great thing to do, I promise I will work well with others and assemble a group. Really, I will.

But what if the thing I'm trying to accomplish does not actually require a group effort? What if it is something little like learning about salamanders in the fifth grade or studying Italian art in high school or learning about eating disorders in an online psychology class? It would be so much more efficient to just work on my own, wouldn't it?

It would to me. Too bad I haven't managed to convince a teacher of that since I started trying in 1975. Teachers love group projects. They swear it is good for me and prepares me for the Real World. Wherever that is.

After putting my group project together alone the night before it was due, I figured that the Real World is a place where one person spends the night at FedEx Kinko's while everyone else takes credit for it.

In fact, I was so bitter about the whole thing that I even typed "I hate group projects" into my search engine. Lo and behold 8 million pages turned up. Most of the authors of those pages were like me - despising the slackers on the team, convinced that groups don't work this way in real life and fantasizing about firing the slackers.

Allison DeKosky, a Penn State senior, even took the time to write a whole column about the "Six Universal and Inescapable Group Project Personality Types."

"In case you're wondering, I still go into interviews and tell prospective employers that I'm a team player. I just hope that the team members in my future have incentives which are a bit more aligned with mine. More importantly, I hope that I can fire the Slackers," she wrote.

Fire the slackers? That sounded so good to me, so fitting, so warm. Then my eye lit on the publishing date for DeKosky's article. She wrote it in 1996. I figured the woman must be in her 30s by now. Did she escape her fate? Did she have to use these group projects in her real life just like her teachers promised? Did she ever, ever get to fire a slacker the way she dreamed about in 1996?

I had to know. DeKosky was pretty easy to find online. After graduation she went on to work as a legislative aide for Sen. Arlen Specter then worked in a private-sector hospital. Now she is a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh. She has completely changed her tune about the value of the group. She even chose her school based on the fact it used small-group learning.

"I can't tell you where I turned the corner. I had a really good experience working for the senator," she told me. "I guess what I realized was that the gamble of having it (the group) be really good is worth it. When it is really good in a group, it's really, REALLY good."

I tried to imagine that. I tried to imagine working with the members of my group in an office and being glad about that. I couldn't. But I think that is the problem with the way we use group projects in middle school, high school and college. We seem to forget that without proper incentives good groups don't spring forth completely formed. People need to be taught the right way to participate in a group. We need to monitor that participation.

Most of all, we need to connect students with the Allison DeKoskys of the real world who successfully use groups every day.