Group Composition Lessons - Pros and Cons

Learning composition in a class format has its plusses and minuses. I've been thinking about this for a while, so I thought I would try to list a few, and ask for your thoughts on the issue.

Plusses:

• Students get to hear each other's work on a weekly basis, which can create a sense of shared mission, and can foster a supportive and positive learning environment.
• Hearing others' works in progress can give us ideas we can use in our own compositions.
• Commenting on the works of others can help develop critiquing skills, and the more developed these are, the better we can critique our own music.
• Students can draw upon classmates' performance skills to arrange readings of works in progress, and to get tips on how to write idiomatically or use extended performance techniques for the instruments they play.
• Feedback given to any particular student is often relevant to other students.
• It gives students multiple perspectives on their compositions, which, since perspective about one's own creations is easy to lose, is particularly valuable.

Minuses:

• There is less time for individual feedback.
• It makes it harder to deal with details, and, as I think everyone understands by now, details are of tremendous importance in composing music.
• The peer feedback process works really well when you get useful feedback, but it works less well when people either don't comment, or don't feel comfortable saying anything 'critical' about others' work.

Any other plusses and minuses you can think of?

What do you think of the the group composition class format?