Education nowadays is filled with projects: working in groups to perform a certain task. As a Master student in Communication Science at the VU, half of my education exists of writing reports, doing research and preparing presentations in groups of 4 to 6 people. Interesting, but also exhausting at some point. Because unlike what many education developers think, college teams just don’t work the same as teams in organisations do.

College has always been a place for students to learn and to develop their skills. Personally. Their goals is to learn skills, get knowledge, find a trade or profession and get that degree. Individually. Which means, students’ goals are always aimed at personal goals, and not at shared goals. In many cases these goals aren’t very specific yet. Many do not know their strenghts and weaknesses yet, what they want to do with their lives or which specific skills they want to learn. They may understand the use of learning certain things, but as easily discard those they think irrelevant. Not to say this does not apply to professionals either though…

A second, and maybe even bigger difference: students in college that work in groups, generally follow the same course. For example: they all study Communication, and thus all want to be communication specialists. They may even all have a focus on marketing or sales.

Research tells us that the teams that are the most effective in working situations, are those teams that are diverse. Diverse in age, gender, or even location, but also diverse in specialty, world view, knowledge or skill. However marginal the differences, most student groups consist of people of around the same age, having a shared focus (namely the subject of their study), usually living in the same region and maybe even with (roughly) the same educational background. Effective

Project work in college can be a very usefull thing, however, it seems as if it has become so important to educational developers these days, that the individual seems to dissolve “into the masses”, instead of being able to show individual skill. Where in business teams people are being consulted for their specific knowledge, skill or specialty, in educational groups this hardly ever happens. Students all need to learn the same skill: “working together”.

How long will education fool itself into thinking that “teamwork” is just a matter of putting students together into groups?