Project group with international students

As at the IUT, group projects are very present at Hanze University. There are in almost all courses in the minor European Business.

However, even if you are used to doing this, working in groups with international students is definitely not the same thing. This has its own difficulties that must be overcome.

Let's start from a simple observation: the way of working is not the same from one country to another. Everything can be different. The way to divide the work, to do it, to manage the group (meeting or not), the strictness. Each of us have been shaped in a certain way during our studies and it will be difficult to change ourselves.

Even if the personalities also come into play a lot I could still notice some trends for each nationality

Thus, this often creates conflicts because groups are not well managed.

It is very common here to build a kind of "rules" signed by the whole group and the teacher. If one of the rules is not respected, there may be have sanctions, such as the distribution of the grade according to the involvement. For example, if the group gets 6/10 but one of the group members admits that they have done less work, they can give his/her points to the others to increase their grades.

At first, these practices were really surprising for me, but finally I understood that it is very cultural.

One of the first groups I had to form was very difficult to deal with for several reasons.

First of all, it was difficult for me at the beginning to express my ideas, because my level of English was not good enough in comparison to the others.

Then one of the members, who had established himself as a leader because he was repeating his year, had a lot of difficulty to work in group and thus to contribute to the group's progress. He was putting himself in a situation that was neither beneficial to him nor to us since he was doing a lot of work without keeping the group informed, while blaming us for not being involved.

Unfortunately, I had to come into conflict with him to make him become aware that the role of a leader was to lead others towards a common goal and not to crush them.

As a result when my level of English allowed it, I was able to find my way in the different groups and sometimes took the lead in order to manage the group as well as possible.

But, how is it actually possible to work in a group with international students?

Think about that everyone has their own way of doing things and their own strengths, so it will be impossible to reach a perfect homogeneity. So take a step back and try to identify each other's strengths in order to assign them the best responsibility that they can expect.