May 1, 2014

Supporting team success in long-term projects

Randy Beam: Teaching Teamwork Explicitly

Undergraduate students often complain about working in teams and many claim to hate group projects. However, well-structured group work can improve student engagement, deepen learning, and help students build essential skills for their professional and personal lives.¹ Because workplaces are increasingly collaborative, employers look for candidates with a demonstrated ability to work well in diverse teams.^2,3 Teamwork skills also help graduates become successful leaders and collaborators in their communities. Although students are often asked to work in groups, few have been taught how to do so effectively. UW faculty, such as Randy Beam, are trying to change this pattern. They explicitly teach teamwork skills in class. In doing so, they help students develop skills essential both in college and after graduation. In addition to the strategies profiled below, teamwork techniques used by Beam are described in a “Teaching Teamwork” video, available on the 2y2d Initiative website.

Take Randy Beam’s class and you’ll be graded on your grasp of communication theory and your ability to function in a team. Beam added theory and practice in teamwork to his syllabi after realizing that his students have a lot of experience—but not necessarily a lot of success—working in groups. He decided, “If I was going to ask students to work in a group, I needed to provide some guidance on how to do that in an effective and efficient way. That’s why I put together a teamwork system that I follow. I call it a system deliberately. It’s not just about having a policy on slackers or just devoting a session to training on group processes. You do all these things because they are mutually reinforcing.” Beam has used this system in several classes, including one with over 400 students who work on term-long group projects during Friday discussion sessions. Here are his principles for guiding student groups:

Provide explicit instruction in team dynamics: Students read excerpts from Working in Groups by Engleberg and Wynn and spend a discussion session on exercises to establish expectations and norms for their group’s collaborative work. They discuss how the project fits into their competing priorities—and how their priorities impact their commitment levels and responsibilities to the team. Most importantly, they establish operating guidelines for working together: how they will make decisions, divide and submit the work, voice concerns, resolve differences, and ensure performance. They also decide how they would modify these guidelines if they find mid-quarter that they are no longer working well as a team.

Monitor progress on group projects: Beam and his TAs check in regularly with groups to ensure they are working well together. In addition, groups submit regular progress reports, meeting notes, and drafts. “You have to be there for the students. You have to encourage them to work well together and to troubleshoot problems that they might have in a group,” he says.

Make team performance count with a slacker policy: A high-stakes policy includes specific, automatic triggers that can cause a student to be removed from a team. The policy also allows groups to request the removal of a member, for example, a student who is not following group guidelines or contributing as agreed to group work. Students who have been removed then have to complete the project on their own. Beam includes the policy in the course outline, as well as explaining in class the actions that will trigger removal from a group.

Ask students to reflect and evaluate their team’s work: At the end of the term, students complete a self-evaluation, as well as peer evaluations to reflect on the experience working as a team. In the peer evaluations, Beam asks students to estimate the percentage of work performed by each team member.

Resources: Beam drew inspiration and materials from: W. Gibb Dyer, Jeffrey H. Dyer, and William G. Dyer, Team Building: Proven Strategies for Improving Team Performance, 5th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 2013); and Isa Engleberg and Dianna Wynn, Working in Groups, 6th ed. (New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2012). Contact Beam for copies of the worksheets he developed for his students at rabeam@uw.edu.

¹Kyllonen, Patrick C. “Soft Skills for the Workplace.” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, November-December 2013. http://www.changemag.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/2013/November-December%202013/soft_skills_full.html.

²Atman, Cynthia J., Sheri D. Sheppard, Jennifer Turns, Robin S. Adams, Lorraine N. Fleming, Reed Stevens, Ruth A. Streveler, Karl A. Smith, Ronald L. Miller, Larry J. Leifer, Ken Yasuhara, and Dennis Lund. Enabling Engineering Student Success: The Final Report for the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2010. http://www.engr.washington.edu/caee/CAEE%20final%20report%2020101102.pdf.

³National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). Job Outlook 2013. Bethlehem, PA: NACE, November 2012. http://www.engr.colostate.edu/ece/ind_relations/job-outlook-2013.pdf.

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