Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?When teachers assign projects on which students must work together, the students learn much more effectively than when they are asked to work alone on projects.Use specific reasons and examples to supp

Students at some point of their school life must work together with others on some projects. And many self-reliant students would complain about it thinking that working with others is a waste of time. But teachers often have a different opinion: they believe teamwork is more helpful for learning than working autonomously. Personally, I concur because working together provides an opportunity to exchange knowledge with others while having fun, altogether makes the learning more effective.

To start with, any teamwork is accompanied by debate and discussions which reveal how much each member of the group knows and thus mapping out their strengths and weaknesses. This analysis is crucial for the success of the team because each student should overcome his or her weakness and learn from the strengths of the rest in order to build a perfect team. In this process of complementing each other, they are learning and improving. For instance, I remember back at the university, one subject required us in groups of six students to carry out a survey and then write a report. In my team, some were good in coming up with significant questions to ask people, others were experts in writing reports, and I was a good data analyst, each of us shared our knowledge to the rest so as to master the project. Therefore, working together was the only way to accomplish the assignment successfully and everyone learned what was wanting.

Moreover, working with other students is more dynamic and less stressful than working alone which helps in learning. According to scientific studies, people learn better when they are more relaxed because stress impedes them to think clearly. Continuing with the example above, I learnt how to write a report by watching my peer doing it while he was explaining it to us, and then I could write some part of it as well, so this combination of theory and practice in situ was a very effective way of learning for me. If I were working alone, I probably got stuck due to the lack of knowledge and stressed because it would have caused extra work.

In short, when students are working together on a project, they can complement each other and learn faster and more effective since they share a common language in the sense that they can easily understand the difficulty of others which is conducive to the success of the project.