What's craziest to me is that someone thought you could put together two groups of students in a high stakes situation without first socializing the interaction

What's craziest to me is that someone thought you could put together two groups of students in a high stakes situation without first socializing the interaction. Half the point of school is to get students to first fail in a low-stakes way. Groups need time to develop. Any change in a group will cause it to storm before re-norming. The higher the stakes the more critical it is to navigate storming effectively. You "learn by doing", i.e., by getting students to storm 50 times before the the stakes are high. Students should not have to pay the price for someone else's crash course in learning design.