I've recently been on a seminar about this and it contained one of the least useful pieces of advice I've heard for a while: "consider the impact on minorities

I've recently been on a seminar about this and it contained one of the least useful pieces of advice I've heard for a while: "consider the impact on minorities of how students are assigned to groups". Useless because there's a real issue here but absolutely no information on _how_ to do this, e.g. good or bad examples. I spoke to someone who's been doing group work for a while and she gave the following more useful advice: if you have a class with say 10% women, pick the groups yourself as instructor, never let the students do it all on their own. You want to avoid both "the women's group" (they all self-sort into one group) and "the one woman in the group, who is instantly elected group secretary". I'd be interested to hear people's perspectives on this. Regarding the "slackers" issue, there's a whole "methodology" called Team-Based Learning (https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/team-based-learning/ https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/team-based-learn...) that has thoughts on how to address this. In their opinion, as far as I understand it, you make mixed-ability groups but you also test people individually. One way is to give all group members an individual multiple-choice test on the pre-reading that you set, at the start of the session, and then collect the results and have a look through them while the groups work on their first task.