Group work is hard. Not because students can't collaborate — because most tasks don't require it. The most common failure mode in collaborative learning is not student behaviour — it's task design.
When a task can be completed adequately by one person working alone, the group's incentive structure collapses. One student does the work, the others wait or help minimally, and the "group work" is really just one person working in the vicinity of others.
Genuine collaboration requires tasks that are genuinely collaborative — where the answer cannot be reached without multiple perspectives, where division of labour is structurally necessary, where disagreement is informative rather than obstructive.
This cluster starts with that design problem before moving to the interpersonal and cultural dimensions. Article 1