Teamwork and Experiential Learning

Instructors can assist students to gain the most out of their experiential learning team experience by providing a framework for students to understand the benefits as well as the challenges of teaming.

• Explain the elements of teaming
  • What is a team?
  • Why teams matter
  • Teach how to build a good team
  • How to give and receive feedback

• Provide support for teams to:
  • Establish Problem(s) and Goal(s)
  • Identify Needs and Actions
  • Select Roles, Responsibilities and Timelines

• Rate or grade teams based on their contributions as perceived by all participants in the team (partners, teammates, instructional staff, etc)

Example slide show for discussing teaming with students

• Explaining Teams Presentation Template

Additional Resources

• A comprehensive range of teaming resources for faculty and students from Questrom Team Learning
• WPI’s SWEET Center includes examples of team contracts and asset mapping exercises on its site

Student Preferences

Students will have more buy-in to projects if they feel involved in the process of selecting or creating the project they will be working on. For some projects, this is simple because the team will define the project as part of the project. 

However, in many cases, the projects will be previously established. While there are other ways to increase student buy-in later in the process, at team formation time, it can be very beneficial to ask the students for their preferences by project. In other words, provide the students an overview of each of the projects and let them rank order them. 

Another consideration is that some students may have personal challenges with the topics of one or more of the projects. If possible, include in the “preferences form” an opportunity for students to privately indicate projects that would be a challenge for them to participate in.

Student Availability

If you expect the students to work on the projects outside of normal, structured class time, it can be really helpful to consider their schedules as part of team formation. If possible, include information about when their classes are, work hours, other commitments, etc. 

Availability is particularly important when it comes to meetings with “clients.” Many projects have the concept of an “owner” or a “client”. All of the meetings with this person or people are, typically, a very important part of the experience for the student team. Aim to establish before the project begins a set of agreed upon times with both the clients and the class on when these meetings will take place.

If necessary, consider having the team name one team member the “team representative” whose schedule is prioritized when creating meetings. The team representative can then provide the continuity to the “client” and the rest of the team if schedules prove particularly challenging.

Student Relationships

Based on our experience, the least important factor in forming teams should be the existing relationships between students, as this usually does not contribute significantly to the learning outcomes of the class. However, it is still useful to gather data on student preferences for team members, emphasizing that this is merely for information purposes and does not guarantee any outcomes. A critical consideration is the potential for negative histories between some students. It’s crucial to discreetly collect such information and, depending on its severity, take it into account when forming teams.

Team Changes

Allowing students to change teams once the teams have been created results in endless challenges. Thus, aside from the considerations mentioned above, consider encouraging students to stay in their teams even if the team dynamic is not a good one. Instead, use the situation as a teaching exercise and work with the students to help build a better team. Teaching assistants or other instructional staff may be used to coach these teams to work better together as the presence of a faculty member can be too formal for the students to really work through issues. If you have access to specialists in team building, they can also be very useful in these scenarios. If possible, instructional staff attempting to coach recalcitrant teams should ask for training in how to support teams with difficult dynamics.  

Sample Project Preference Form

• Template Project Preferences Form

• We have found it to be extremely important to establish the problem(s) and goal(s) of the project well before the class starts. Working with the project owner, establishing a clear sense of the “problem” and committing it to a “Project Description” document really helps the students to understand the context of the project.
• Providing background information or readings is also a good idea, further enhancing the team’s understanding of the context of the project. We have also found it to be valuable to provide comparison projects or solutions, sometimes from prior classes, to further enhance the team’s understanding of the project.
• Establishing the goal(s) of the project is also extremely important. The goals should be something that a typical team in the class can accomplish in a semester. The wording may be high level in order to allow the team the experience of refining goals but you and the project owner should have a good idea of what you are expecting. We have also found it beneficial to also provide a few “stretch” goals for teams that are able to reach beyond “typical.”

Additional Resources

• Template Project Description
• Sample Project Description: CHAOSS Slackbot
• Sample Project Description: Community Service Center

Give the students 60 minutes to develop their team agreements.

While they are working, try to give interim feedback and/or answer questions around the room. Emphasize the grading will be for “completion” & “quality” not “correctness.” In other words, the students should be graded on “did they put effort into their content” vs “do they completely understand team agreements.”

Student groups should develop brief answers to the following 8 categories (featured in the Team Agreement Template below):

• Goals/ Mission
  • What is the goal of this project
• Values
  • What does the team wish to prioritize for the work they do?
• Responsibilities
  • Who does what type of work
  • Identify 3rd parties and their responsibilities/roles in the project, with names (e.g. “client”)
• Decisions/Process
  • Consensus? Democratic?
• How we work
  • Tools for task tracking and use
• Communication
  • Text, slack, etc: Note here, we recommend that the communication channels include instructional staff to ensure that the communication remains professional and inclusive
  • Reviewing communication participation can be a good metric for grading/evaluation of individual team members
•  Metrics/Measuring Progress
  • How does the team share with the instructors the status of their project? The “client”?
• Meetings
  • Establish meeting times/locations
  • Does everyone need to be at every meeting?
  • Are there “meeting approximations”? e.g. a slack checkin daily to ensure people are on track and not blocked
• Definition of Done
  • Ensure that the team has defined what it means for a task to be “complete”. For example, many people will consider a task complete when they have “done their work.” However, it might be better to only consider it complete when the rest of the team has accepted the work and reviewed its quality.

Additional Resources

• Team Agreement Template
• Contracts (part 2)
• Team Contracts

Sample Project Timeline: Combine Course Assignment Deadlines with Internal and Sub-Group Meetings and Deadlines 

Team Retrospectives

Building in reflective pauses for individuals and teams is an important part of experiential learning (please see Reflection for Experiential Learning for more information). For the team, there should be a “retrospective” component of their work planning meetings. In other words, when the team gets together to plan the next phase of work, the team first reflects on the following questions and someone takes notes and recommendations for changes. The team should be encouraged to think of this as an opportunity to try something new for the next phase of work; if this new approach doesn’t work, it can be edited at the next retrospective. The Scrum Methodology provides a good explanation of this team reflection in What is a Sprint Retrospective.

1. What went well?
   • Identifies successes and positive experiences to reinforce effective practices.
2. What didn’t go well?
   • Highlights challenges, obstacles, or areas of struggle to address.
3. What have we learned?
   • Encourages reflection on new insights, understanding, and growth opportunities.
4. What still puzzles us?
   • Opens the floor for unresolved questions or confusion that may need further discussion or external input.
5. What should we start doing?
   • Looks for new ideas, practices, or tools that the team isn’t currently using but could benefit from.
6. What should we stop doing?
   • Identifies activities, processes, or behaviors that are not adding value or negatively impacting the team.
7. What should we continue doing?
   • Acknowledges and reinforces effective practices and successful strategies that should be maintained.

Many others can be added but a focus on keeping the meeting brief and without blame are extremely important.

Individual Reflections

To provide students with the opportunity to reflect on their learning and to help them stay accountable to other team members, they can be asked to submit essay reflections on their experience with the project. The first reflection can be in the first half of the project as part of the “Discovery Phase” and the second reflection comes at the end of the project, with a focus on the “Implementation Phase”. An example of the Discovery Reflection is provided below (currently available only for Boston University instructors) . Instructors will likely need to customize this based on their class and projects.

Discovery Phase Reflection Example

Peer Feedback

One of the challenges with ensuring teams are productive and positive is encouraging all team members to contribute to the best of their abilities. This challenge is multi-dimensional.

First, the team members may not all be able to contribute equally because of time, skills, etc. However, this should still be regarded as “sufficient” for the team. The team should be taught to respect the amount of contribution each team member is capable of.

Next, not all the team members will respect the contributions of all other team members. This may be observed, for example, in software teams where developers may not respect the contributions of documentation writers or user experience designers or vice versa. Instructors are encouraged to discuss the way all skills are essential for the project to be successfully implemented and to build a community understanding of how all team members’ contributions are important and even required.

Finally, students may need assistance in learning how to provide useful feedback to each other. The ability for team members to provide effective feedback on performance is an essential skill to build, and has a direct impact on team effectiveness and success. Effective feedback aligns people. It leads to increased trust, commitment, and motivation. The goal of feedback is to help the team function and perform better.

The Team Learning Assistant (TLA) approach will strengthen students’ skills in providing helpful feedback to each other.

When providing feedback on your team, use the Plus/Delta approach:

Begin by addressing the positive performance and behaviors that you have observed, and would like to see continue. Be sure to recognize your teammates for their specific contributions to the team.

Remember to provide specific examples, focus on the behavior rather than the person/personality, and indicate a sincere willingness to help. An example is provided below:

• Plus
  • You contributed the most to the main analysis of the paper. I was struck by your insight and ability to build a strong argument using the data we collected.
  • Additionally, you were the person on the team who regularly spoke up when deadlines were approaching and that kept us on track.
• Delta
  • Early in the semester, I thought that you were not prepared, but my opinion changed as I saw your work. I think that if you were able to communicate your ideas earlier in the project, people would have turned to you and listened easily.

Two rounds of peer feedback, one during the middle of the project and one at the end, will support the team understanding of all contributions. Before the project starts the teams should be made aware of these feedback opportunities. Some instructors choose to have peer feedback impact the individual grade of team members; for example, if the team is given a project grade of an A but one student was poorly reviewed by their peers, they may receive an A-.  Typically, the impact of negative reviews is much greater than the impact of positive reviews.

Additional Resources

• Example of Peer Feedback Form (for copying purposes only)
• Addressing Meeting Preparation
• Tips for TLA: Performance Feedback