Group Work: Study Skills

Working well in a group

Working well in a group involves teamwork, communication, and shared responsibility. Here, we’ll cover setting ground rules, defining group roles, and managing your time to ensure everyone is on track and productive.

When your group is formed or assigned, setting ground rules can be key to collaborating effectively. It can help streamline your approach and avoid any challenges later on. Here’s what to consider:

• Deadlines and Submissions: When is your project due? Make sure everyone knows the submission date and any project deadlines.
• Meeting Frequency: How often will your group meet? Look at everyone’s schedules and plan meetings. What if extra meetings are needed?
• Attendance Policies: What happens if someone can’t make a meeting? Decide on how to handle a team member not attending and missed work.
• Meeting Locations: Will you meet online, on campus, or somewhere else? Set up a clear plan for where and when you’ll get together.
• Communication Channels: How will you stay in touch between meetings? Decide if you’ll use email, social media, or another method and set boundaries for communication hours.
• Task Allocation: How will you assign tasks? Will responsibilities rotate or remain fixed? Make sure everyone knows their role.
• Tracking Progress: How will you monitor progress? Establish a method for keeping track of who’s done what.

The Word document below provides a ground rules template that you can download, save, and adapt to meet the needs of your project. When everyone in the group agrees to the rules in writing, it's easier to avoid misunderstandings and prevent conflict.

Group roles

Assigning roles in your group can help keep things organised and ensures everyone has a chance to contribute. Decide if roles will be rotated or fixed to suit your group’s needs. Here’s a breakdown of typical roles you might consider:

• Facilitator: Begins meetings, clarifies goals, and ensures everyone understands what needs to be done.
• Organiser: Schedules meetings, plans agendas, and gathers materials from team members.
• Notetaker: Records meeting notes, tracks action items, and shares updates with the team.
• Timekeeper: Keeps an eye on the clock during meetings and manages project timelines.

Roles may evolve as your project progresses. For example, if your project includes a presentation, one group member may rough draft the wording for the slides, another may manage design and accessibility, and a third may oversee creation of graphs and charts.

Throughout the project, you should regularly discuss the distribution of responsibilities to ensure everyone is carrying a fair workload. You can ideally work together to play to each member's strengths.

Plan and record your group work

Imagine trying to bake a new cake without a recipe—stressful, right? That’s where meeting agendas, meeting records and task planners come in. Think of them as your recipe for a successful group project. An agenda is like your shopping list, making sure you have all the ingredients and know exactly what to do next. And meeting notes help keep track of your progress, so you don’t forget a crucial step (like forgetting to preheat your oven). With these tools, your group will stay organised, on point, and on track to create a successful project.

You can download digital agenda templates,  meeting minutes templates and project trackers, or you can create your own. Either way, using these tools will help your group...

• Stay on topic: An agenda can help the meeting to be focused and cover all the important points.
• Manage time: Your group can allocate time for different tasks.
• Make expectations clear: Your group will have a record of who is responsible for different tasks.
• Keep everyone informed: If a group member needs to miss a meeting, they can use the notes to catch up.
• Minimise confusion: Written records can help us to recall information.

Remember, when you are allocating team roles you may need to discuss whose responsibility it is to create the agenda, record the minutes and add to the planner. You may rotate this responsibility for different meetings.

You may find it helpful to use digital tools, such as Microsoft OneNote to create agendas and organise minutes or Microsoft Planner to record and assign tasks. 

Tips for avoiding conflict

Avoiding conflicts in group work can help everyone stay productive and positive. Here’s how to sidestep common challenges:

• Set ground rules early: Establish clear goals, deadlines, and roles to prevent misunderstandings from cropping up later.
• Communicate openly: Regular check-ins and honest discussions can help address concerns before they become issues.
• Use a decision-making process: Whether it’s voting, discussing until you reach a consensus, or delegating, having a clear decision-making process ensures everyone feels involved.
• Plan ahead: Create a timeline and stick to it. Good planning prevents last-minute rushes and stress.
• Be flexible: Sometimes things don’t go as planned. Be ready to adjust goals or timelines as needed to keep everything on track.

Sponge or Trampoline? 

Effective communication is an integral part of successful group work. To be a good communicator, sometimes, you need to be a sponge. You may need to carefully listen to your team’s perspectives and absorb their ideas. At other times, you’ll need to be a trampoline. You’ll need to help bounce ideas and ask questions.

Finding the balance between absorbing information and bouncing ideas can help build a collaborative, creative, and productive group dynamic. Explore our practical tips on effective communication and when to be a sponge or trampoline. 

Effective Listening

Asking questions for clarification or additional information

• Take notes of anything you would like to ask – this enables you to remember your question without interrupting.
• Restate or paraphrase the speaker’s ideas to seek clarification.
• Ask open-ended questions.

Supporting everyone to contribute

• Set clear roles for each team member.
• Create meeting agendas with allocated time for each member to contribute. Circulating agendas before meetings enables team members to think and prepare in advance; in turn, this maximises contributions during meetings.
  • Consider rotating who creates the agenda to ensure a fair balance of this responsibility.
• Use collaborative tools like Microsoft Whiteboard or Google Docs so everyone can add and contribute at their own pace.
• Use a physical item or prompt to show whose turn it is to speak (i.e., a ball, a pen).
• To avoid interruptions, ask team members to raise their hands to ask questions.

Active listening

• Consider enacting a 'no phones' policy during the discussion/sharing portions of group meetings.
• If you are using your laptop to make notes, close or mute anything that may distract from your listening.
• Demonstrate you are listening. This may be with body language (e.g. eye contact, nodding, or angling towards the speaker). These physical listening cues are different for everyone, so do what you are comfortable with.

Keeping suggestions and feedback constructive

• Focus on the task, rather than the person.
  • For example, 'This argument could be explained in more detail,' instead of 'You didn’t explain this well.'
• Offer solutions.
  • 'I think this slide may have too much text. Maybe we can add bullet points.'
• Use 'I' statements. This can help your feedback sound personal.
  • 'I’m not clear on this graph. Maybe we can simplify it.'
• Explore our Peer Feedback guide for more tips on giving feedback to, and receiving feedback from, fellow students.