Every fall, she can predict it like clockwork. The moment she announces, “Our next assignment will be a group project,” she hears the same thing.
“Ugh."
Professor Christine Boyko-Head works at Mohawk College. She teaches communication skills to students in vocational training programs. Her students are studying to be nurses, engineers, tradesmen—all jobs that require teamwork. Yet, every semester, the prospect of group work produces a collective groan. A groan!
Why don’t people like group work? You’d think it would make life easier. Hypothetically, everyone is pitching in. Everyone’s load should get a little lighter. But somehow, it never works out like that. Not for most students.
Christine has ample proof. At the end of every semester, she asks students to write a personal reflection on their group project. For years, their comments were variations of the following: “Well, I worked hard, but other people didn’t carry their weight.” “Two of us did all the work, but the rest of them just coasted.” The complaints were always the same. So was the language.
Boyko-Head got her PhD in English Literature. She’s very attuned to language. She notices things like pronouns: the constant complaint of “us” versus “them” in those reflection papers.
When she heard about the FourSight assessment, she was intrigued by its promise to improve collaboration and teamwork. She set up her own research study. She gave FourSight to the student teams and watched their language to see if the assessment actually moved the dial on people’s experience of group work.
The results at the end of the semester were nothing short of stunning. You could actually measure it in the language of the reflection papers, said Boyko-Head. Instead of all the “us” versus “them,” the language shifted to “we” “our” and “us.” She read reflections like: “Awareness of thinking preferences helped us meet group goals – which is essential to our field.”
With the simple intervention of a FourSight Mindset Reveal workshop, the whole experience of group work changed. Today, other professors including Mike Ackerbauer and Carole Bogash are using FourSight as the class assessment and “Good Team, Bad Team” as a textbook. Their goal is to help students who have been trained to think individually, to learn the power of good team work.
