Note to My Superiors: Meetings Make Us Dumber!

In a poetry class back at university, my prof decided to be trendy and have us work in groups on a big project. A friend of mine in the class turned to me and rolled his eyes. Both of us had great contempt for group activities. We had individual learning styles; we knew we had always learned best working alone, at our own pace. Whenever our teachers stuck us in groups, our intellectual efforts were constantly compromised by the emotional effort of navigating the artifical social dynamic (and usually, when teachers put kids in groups, they deliberately impose some arrangement that breaks up the natural alignments kids would choose naturally). We couldn't pursue ideas as they occurred to us; we had to wait our turn, address whatever came up on the group's agenda. But given that "cooperative learning" was the big thing on the educational reform radar, teachers in every institution, even at the university level, where profs are more immune to the machinations of the education industry, started throwing their kids into groups to prove what innovative educators they were. My friend and I saw the flaws in cooperative education, and we promised in that poetry class to someday write a book: Saddled with Idiots: Cooperative Learning and the Rule of Mediocrity.

That book hasn't materialized yet, but a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that our complaint against cooperative learning is not just the whining of two smart-alecks in the back of the room. As reported on MSNBC, brainstorming in groups actually produces fewer results than brainstorming individually:

People have a harder time coming up with alternative solutions to a problem when they are part of a group, new research suggests.

Scientists exposed study participants to one brand of soft drink then asked them to think of alternative brands. Alone, they came up with significantly more products than when they were grouped with two others.

The results may bode well for advertisers -- buy ad time during big events like the Super Bowl, and you'll get more impact when your ad plays in front of people watching an event together -- but the study also suggests that the unavoidable groupthink of meetings limits creativity. Researcher H. Shanker Krishnan, marketing prof at Indiana University, says that the discussion that naturally arises in groups crowds out brainstorming for different ideas. He also speaks directly to learning styles. The MSNBC article continues:

Another contributing factor is variation in learning and memory styles. People store and retrieve information in myriad ways, so in a group situation, the conversation could cause individuals to think about the cues differently than they would if they were alone.

Krishnan said individuals, whether students, executives or football fans, should take time to consider the facts on their own before coming to a consensus.

Dr. Krishnan's research squares perfectly with my experience in staff meetings and teacher in-services. I have yet to experience a group activity where I have come away with more knowledge and tools that I can apply to my curriculum and coaching than I can produce working on my own. My most productive in-service days are not those when I am stuck in a group or listening to some self-proclaimed expert, but when I am given those precious opportunities to hunker down in my classroom and work on my own. I'm free then to seek input and collaboration if I choose, if such cooperation presents itself organically in the flow of the work I'm doing, but I'm not hindered by the social dynamics that interfere with my creativity and concentration.

Our in-service speaker back in August told us that if we do anything in our classrooms that's not backed by research, we should be sued for malpractice. Now I have research to show that putting us teachers in groups at in-services dumbs us down. I don't plan to sue, but I will get a copy of this study and keep it handy at school. I hope my school administrators will do the same.