Four Teamwork Principles Or What I Learn

Teamwork at the U of M: What I learned from students, colleagues, and the
literature
Soon the Center for Teaching and Learning will launch a website designed to help
students be more successful in their team projects. We define teams as formal
groupings of students that stay together over extended periods of time and work on a
common goal such as a group project in a class. In preparing this site, my colleagues
and I surveyed faculty to determine the areas of assistance they thought their students
needed. We talked to undergraduates in focus group sessions to determine their
attitudes towards group work. We asked students what resources would help them
while working in a team on a class project. We also consulted the literature on
cooperative learning, teamwork, and group dynamics (see my WOW blog post?). As a
result of this intensive experience four principles have emerged for me that I think are
critical for student success. I plan to incorporate these principles in my own teaching
and I encourage any instructor who uses and assigns team projects in their courses to
consider adopting them.
1. Assign the teams early in the semester.
Assign teams to distribute relevant experience and skills. Larry Michaelsen refers to
this as distributing member resources. Michaelsen explains that each team should
have access to the assets that exist in the whole class and not carry more than a fair
share of the liabilities. For instance in my course, Teaching in Higher Education, one of
the assets that exists in the whole class is experience teaching at the college level. In

a pharmacology class the assets may be a strong chemistry or biology background.
These assets are easily determined by giving your students a survey at the beginning of
the semester.

Once formed, mixed experience groups allow students to learn from

each other. A few students told us that they prefer to choose their own groups, yet they
often form groups of similar abilities. However, many students told us that they actually
prefer having the groups assigned by the instructor.
It takes time for teams to gel, so assign teams as early as possible in the semester.
Then give those groups something to work on so that they can work out the kinks. An

early assignment might be to come up with a team policy statement on how they are
going to work together to reach their goals. An additional advantage of assigning teams
early is that it creates a social support system that provides personal accountability and
camaraderie for students. This can be especially important in large lecture classes with
students new to the University.
2. Require students to work on the team process.
By work on team process I mean to spend time as a team discussing the ground rules
for how the team is going to work together over the semester, including how they will

manage conflict. In the previous section I mentioned the possibility of asking teams to
devise a team policy statement. Though there is support for this in the literature, we
found in our focus groups that many students don't think this is important. Many saw
this as a waste of time, even those students who described having negative team
experiences in the past. For our website we created two simple and easy-to-use
documents to assist students with this. The Strengths and Roles Table asks students to
identify their individual strengths and goals for the team project and assign roles
accordingly. The Policies Agreement Guide asks students to come up with policies for
how their team will approach facilitating meetings, managing conflict and holding each
other accountable for their work. When students were asked to evaluate these
documents many said that they might be useful but they probably wouldn't follow these
steps unless their instructor told them to. Requiring student teams to work on team
processes is one small step instructors can take to communicate to students that you
think this is an important use of their time. Assigning a few points for completion of
these documents makes it more likely that students will actually do them. Students
don't need to have a complicated team charter at the end of the process, we believe
that simply having this conversation will improve group dynamics.
3. Design an appropriate project and break it into pieces.
Larry Michaelsen states that the most fundamental aspect of designing appropriate
team assignments is that they truly require group interaction. Choose a project that

requires the input and shared decision-making from all team members for completion.

Avoid projects that students can easily divide amongst team members and work on
individually, such as a writing project. Many students in our focus groups also
commented that they didn't like writing assignments as team projects. More than one
student described an experience where one person usually ended up doing the entire
project for the team. When evaluating your own team project, ask yourself the
following question. Is input from multiple people essential for a high quality product? If
not, you may want to consider modifying your project.
Breaking the project into pieces lowers the stakes of the final turn-in, prevents
procrastination, and distributes your grading more evenly over the semester. For
instance you may ask students to turn in a resource list or annotated bibliography as a
precursor to the final assignment.
4. Provide class time for students to work together.
The most common complaint we heard from our undergraduate focus groups is the
difficulty of juggling the schedules of team members to find meeting time.

Hearing this

same complaint over and over convinced me that it's important to provide class time for

students to meet and work on their project together. In the "real" world of work, teams
are provided time to work together, in fact they're paid for it. If our goal is for students to
create a high quality product, we should do what we can to help them be successful.
Another advantage to providing students time to work together in class is that you are
available to answer any questions or clear up any confusion they may have about the
assignment. In my Teaching in Higher Education class, I give students four one-hour
blocks of time to meet with their teams distributed over four weeks in the beginning of
the semester. If you require some type of output relevant to their team project from this
in-class time, it also helps prevent procrastination.
There were other insights I had from students, my colleagues, and the literature while
working on this project, but these four seemed most important for student success in
team projects. Stay tuned for the official launch of the Center for Teaching and Learning
groupwork website to hear more.