Rafael gave this brief definition aboiut greoupwork and it made me stop to think. I´ll have to reflect on this. I´m a great believer in the power of voluntary teams and I think this definition is based on the wrong idea about a group. If a group is democratically-organically developed and members are allowed to identify their own strengths and the way they can contribute to the successful completion of a task.
I think we should look at the ways we organise groups rather than negate their usefulness.
My other problem is the intrinsic judgement about people being "weak" or "strong". Once again, I believe that we cannot identify people as eithe or both as we are all strong and week at the same time, you don´t want to have a boxing match with Muhamad Ali but you could probably beat him at a maths quiz.
The most difficult aspect of forming and running groups is giving each member and individual role, and offer them ways of contributing to the team effort, as well as design ways to support and scaffold the contribution of the otherwise weaker members.
It is of course also an interesting question what we mean by a strong group? Are they successful at perforning their task? Are they faster in coming up with solutions and producing results? Do they work together better than the other groups?
There are so many ways to interpret what success and a good group is that we cannot just leave it at the conclusion that the weakest links break the chain because groups are not chains, they are interconnected systems where the push and the pull works in a way that always the stong ones get to push and support the weaker ones but who is strong and weak depends on the task at hand.
That might be true,but that only goes if everyone in the group actually does some work! In that case it doesn't particulary matters how much work he/she does or how good it is (thought if it's bad it will drag the team down). But in most group's i have been it was so,that because of one member, the whole group couldn't work (because this one member forgot to do his work or just didn't want to do it, or just played around instead of doing his work.) in that case, one member of the group, has to take the initiative and do al the work, otherwise the work won't get done, and the group will get bad results (a bad result for example) And as this is the result most of the times, i simply don't understand why i should group with a group, just to end up doing all the work so i get a good grade, and the others, who did nothing are also getting a good grade for nothing, for my work! So i prefer to work alone!
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