Group Work Sucks???

In a recent discussion on collaborative work, I couldn't help thinking of a student I had in the very first class I taught, a Comp I section at Owens Community College. She was an incredibly gifted young lady, a great writer/thinker, and her contributions to our classroom discussions were insightful and provocative.
     During the third class of the semester, I assigned a short group activity, telling the students that they had about 15 minutes to complete it. This young lady picked up her bag, grabbed her jacket, and left. Everyone thought she had become ill.
     The following week, another short group activity, this time dividing the class into three teams, and again, she picked up her belongings and walked out the door. Now puzzled, I emailed her, asking what the issue was. Her response: "I may have to drop your class. I have extreme anxiety. Group work sucks."

      Not wanting a student with such potential to quit, I offered her an option:

              I got 3 volunteers from the class to help with an "experiment". Miss Anxiety would be part of the quartet. Whenever group work was to be included in a class, the four would be emailed the instructions ahead of time. They could email each other, divide the work as they wished, and simply bring their contribution to class. There, they would review the work of the other three while the normal group work was taking place and insert comments as they felt necessary. The work would then be turned in with the work of the other traditional groups. This was a great lesson for me about the value of cooperative learning as a partner to collaborative learning.

I offer the following from a provocative article by Aldwin G. Lauron:

            Dillenbourg and Schneider (1995) make a distinction between cooperative and collaborative learning. They indicate that cooperative learning is "... a protocol in which the task is in advance split into sub-tasks that the partners solve independently".

Collaborative learning describes situations "... in which two or more subjects build synchronously and interactively a joint solution to some problem". This distinction places greater emphasis on the extent and quality of the exchanges that occur within groups of students in collaborative environments. With cooperative tasks, participants could agree on the elements of the task and distribute those across group members who would work independently until each has completed her/his component. (2008)

Reference

Lauron, A. G. (2008, April). Fostering Collaboration To Enhance Online Instruction. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education-TOJDE. ISSN 1302-6488 Volume: 9 Number: 2 Article 5