Scaffolding group work with student contracts

In the fields of public health and planetary health, it is rare that we’re working in isolation. Our work is largely team-based and involves people with lots of different perspectives. To emulate real-world practice, my units involve significant group assignments where learners must collaborate and problem solve together.

However, group work is often met with challenges for both learners and educators:

	Learners Learners may face frustration and anxiety due to poor communication between team members or perhaps there are misaligned expectations on progressive deadlines.
	Educators Group dynamic issues can lead to time-consuming administrative processes and professionalism meetings that increase the burden of group assessment.

My colleagues and I introduced the Group Contract as an early, formative task within large group assignments.

Group Contracts have been useful for both learners and educators:

	Learners I’ve received positive feedback that learners experienced smoother communication, advanced scheduling of meetings and a more manageable workload by planning out the tasks ahead of time. The process of setting realistic expectations and playing to each team member's strengths has also been valuable for learners.
	Educators This process meant that we could identify any areas of concern in how a group was working early and take action quickly. For example, identifying team members who weren’t engaged in preparing or signing off on the group contract, communicating effectively with team members and meeting the initial deadline of submitting the signed contract were contacted by me early in the process.

I recommend implementing both the Group Contact at the start and a Group Contribution Statement (or Feedback Fruits) at the end of the assessment process. They are useful sources of information to support learners as they navigate the challenges of teamwork in a really constructive way.

I have not assigned grades for this, as my learners are all in their final-year, however this could be helpful to incentivise and reward effective teamwork in the earlier stages of a degree.

When using Group contracts I found it useful to:

• Provide a downloadable, editable template and give them time in class to start completing the contract.
• Ensure contracts are submitted early enough for issues to be identified and addressed, and to allow groups to respond to feedback so that their group contract has sufficient detail to be helpful.
• Have a clear process for reviewing submitted contracts, and following up with groups that have not yet submitted. I recommend getting just one group member from each group to email it to you. It takes a couple of minutes to scan each contract as it comes through, and you're able to reply really quickly to approve or request a resubmission. Other educators  have tried submission into a Moodle Dropbox, however this requires regular monitoring and more time-consuming correspondence.