I presented my post on social loafing as a Personal World lesson. For the rest of the week students are supposed to reflect on their own habits, and think about when and why they loaf and how to avoid doing so.
We had a good discussion during the lesson. We’ve had a few obvious examples of social loafing over the year with soccer. We started off with one person versus the rest of the class, and every time one of the teams wins two games in a row, the losing team has to pick someone from the winning team for the next game.
In the first few games, the smaller team played their hearts out and was able to hold it’s own remarkably well, but as the year progressed, and students improved their technique and teamwork, the greater numbers began to tell. But as the teams grew it was pretty clear that some of the people who were working really hard before, were taking it easy.
So students are going through the list of reasons why people socially loaf and reflecting on which apply to themselves. Of course when I went over the list during the lesson, I asked if there were any other reasons they could think of based on their own experience. Our resident expert in social loafing had a very Montessori suggestion about why a student might “seem to be” loafing during group work, “What if you want the other students to learn more?”