Creating groups for project work
Project-based learning offers many advantages, including the opportunity for students to work with people of different backgrounds. While working together on projects, they acquire valuable skills for collaboration, for developing their own strengths and for managing group dynamics and conflict. There are several ways to create groups for project-based learning, but they must be well-planned beforehand.
Questions to ask when creating groups
• What size will they be? Think about the age, gender and experience of the students and the complexity of the projects.
• What involvement will students have in creating the groups? • Will we make the decision for them? When grouping students we can consider different variables such as friendships, hobbies, roles, identity, age, gender, experience with projects, etc.
• What skills will the teams need for developing a particular project? Organise into different groups students with an advanced linguistic level, knowledge of programming language or other skills.
• What do you know about the students’ hobbies, needs and interests? Before we start, we can carry out an activity to learn about them.
• As the course progresses, we should create opportunities for collaboration between the groups.
Advantages of cooperative learning
• Real cooperation between the team members increases the quality of the learning, not only by improving social relations but also by creating greater understanding and autonomous learning.
• As well as fostering teamwork, we must also encourage cooperation between the team members, using specific teaching strategies.
Myths about teamwork
- With teamwork, individual responsibility is less important and the only ones who learn are those who show the greatest interest.
- Students will learn in a cooperative way just by putting them in groups.
- When grouping students, it is better to create homogeneous groups of the same level so that they progress together.
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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
danelsolabarrieta (April 9, 2021). Creating groups for project work. SPOON Open Notebook 🥄 SPOON . Retrieved December 8, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/ujd6


























































































