Building Action in the Classroom

Collaboration. Social management. Group work. Project management.

Whatever you call it, we know that our students' ability to work together and manage their time are vital to navigating their lives right now, as well as to unlock all the exciting career and life possibilities waiting for them post-school.

And yet one of the biggest barriers to any group task or project-based learning exercise is the challenge of actually managing the work. How do we help our young people stay organised? How do we help them manage group conflict, or the inevitable complaint about one person doing all the work?

These are questions we hear from educators all the time, and they sit right at the heart of the Future Anything Capability of Action.

What is Action?

In our Capability Framework, we define Action as:

"The ability to take initiative, set goals, and follow through on tasks to make things happen."

Action competencies include:

• Organised: Using tools, strategies, and systems to structure work and manage time.
• Self-Aware: Recognising personal limits, asking for help, and balancing roles in a group.
• Responsible: Setting goals, showing initiative, and following through without prompting.

These are not abstract ideals. They are the specific human skills that research consistently identifies as the difference between a project that succeeds and one that falls apart. Sánchez and colleagues (2019) — whose work underpins this capability — make the case that project management education is fundamentally about people skills, not technical ones. Goal-setting, self-regulation, role awareness, follow-through under pressure: these can be taught, but they have to be deliberately taught.

In this blog, we dive into three big stumbling blocks educators experience when building Action in the classroom, and share some of our top tips for overcoming them.

Barrier 1: Conflict and Team Dynamics

"Mr Edwards, Alex was mean to me!"

"Mrs Smith, Sarah said my ideas are stupid."

We've all been there. You've set students a collaborative task, then spent the whole time refereeing interpersonal conflicts and friendship drama. It's exhausting.

These are our top tips for preventing and managing conflict in teams:

Give students voice and choice. By letting young people choose the topics they explore and how they present their findings, you increase engagement and decrease off-task behaviour. At Future Anything, we encourage students to solve the problems that matter most to them, finding a genuine connection to the problem gives a huge boost to buy-in.

Let students choose their groups, but keep group sizes small. If we choose the groups our students work in, we also choose to manage the dynamics of that group. Even though it may seem risky, having students choose their own groups gives them the responsibility for managing them (with great power, comes great responsibility!). Help students choose wisely by keeping groups to three members or fewer, and finding ways to group by interest rather than friendship.

Set up group norms. We expect our students to work effectively in teams, but we rarely teach them how to do this explicitly. Spend time at the beginning of any project establishing what it takes to be a good team member, what the communication expectations are, and what happens if norms are broken. This article is a great resource for establishing norms in group work.

Barrier 2: Unequal Contribution

One of the biggest bugbears around group work — for students and, dare I say, adults — is that one person ends up doing all the work.

While this is inextricably linked to establishing group norms, there are also some practical ways to address it at the whole-class level.

Embed individual reflection into your project. This could be a short journal entry, video, voice note, or similar. Requiring each member to reflect on their own role, responsibilities, and contributions helps ensure the workload is more evenly distributed. It also provides a more accurate basis for feedback and assessment, allowing you to look beyond the final product.

Model how to break the project into individual tasks. Use Post-it notes to facilitate this with your students:

1. Identify the key tasks needed to achieve the project goal.
2. Break each into sub-tasks. One per Post-it note.
3. Place the sub-tasks on a timeline to map the sequence they need to happen in.
4. Add deadlines to each Post-it, and if working in a team, add initials to show who owns each one.
5. Convert this physical map into a digital tool to keep it live (see Barrier 3 below for suggestions).

The big win from this approach: rather than assigning students a predetermined role like 'researcher' or 'marketing expert,' students can choose the tasks that suit them and create their own role title afterwards. It also helps students anticipate busy periods and plan ahead, rather than discovering three things are due on the same day.

Barrier 3: Keeping the Project Moving Forward

"Mrs Evans, Sarah said she'd do the PowerPoint but now she's on holidays."

"Mr Jones, I just want you to know I did the whole speech myself. Charlie didn't help at all."

There are two things happening here: students losing momentum or losing sight of where the project is going, and educators struggling to monitor progress and provide timely support. Leveraging technology is one of the best ways to address both.

Trello is a favourite across the Future Anything team — a project management app that helps create and assign tasks and monitor progress. This video walks through the functionality for group projects, and there's even a ready-made PBL template to borrow. For something more comprehensive, Asana is worth exploring, and Kanbanchi is a great option for Google Workspace schools.

Mural (or Miro) allows groups to work simultaneously on the same digital board, adding notes, files, and images while chatting or video-calling right inside the space — great for brainstorming and collaborative planning.

Seesaw is a favourite for primary and lower secondary contexts. Students can record video or voice note reflections and build a portfolio of their work over time. Parents can also view progress, which is a bonus in many contexts.

Microsoft Teams has a surprising number of features for group management. Setting up a private channel per team — with shared documents, Planner, and chat — gives students a genuine home for their project work. This video is a useful starting point (note: you may need to work with your IT department to enable certain features first).

Is it all worth it?

We know collaboration and group work can feel 'too hard' when we're juggling so many competing priorities. But as educators, we strive to provide the best possible learning experiences for our students.

By incorporating Action into our curriculum, building the habits of organisation, self-awareness, and responsible follow-through, we not only equip our students with tools for success in their future endeavours, we transform the learning experience in our classrooms. We empower our students to become effective problem solvers and leaders, and we create a more dynamic and interactive learning environment.

The Future Anything Challenge and our Student Innovation Workshops build confident communicators of all ages, by empowering young people to develop, and then persuasively pitch, innovative social enterprise solutions to the problems they care about. Find out more about our programs here.