Creating an Effective Team

Rationale

• It is reasonable to wonder whether being on a team is useful, especially if you prefer to solve problems on your own, and your past experiences doing teamwork have been negative.

• Many students who have been forced to work on teams have very negative feelings about teamwork, especially if they found themselves "carrying" the team, and were forced to do extra work because their teammates did not put in an equal amount of time and effort. Seeing a teammate reap the benefit of your hard work, and feeling that he or she did almost nothing to deserve the reward, can lead to natural feelings of anger and resentment.

• First, we want to reassure you that we monitor team progress carefully and regularly. As a consequence, we will often be able to tell very early on if a team is working well or not, and will try to gently intervene to help the team get back on track.

• Second, if you are really unhappy with your team dynamics, make sure to talk to us about it. It would be a good idea not to offend the feelings of your teammate by doing this in front of him or her, but send us an email, or approach us before or after class to set up a time to discuss the issue. We will always make time to meet with each teammate separately to see if we can help the team work out the problem.

• Third, if a team is really not working out, we will re-assign teammates.

• Remember, having a teammate is both a privilege and a responsibility. On rare occasions, we have been impelled to ask a student to work alone. Generally, students do very poorly under these conditions, so we consider this a last resort.

A Helpful Checklist

• Have you gotten the contact information for your teammate so that you can be in touch regularly?

• Are you coming to class prepared, and do you and your teammate work out a plan at the start of each class for how to work through the class material as effectively as possible?

• Are you "checking in" with your teammate throughout class - are you discussing approaches to solving the problems, suggesting ideas, and encouraging him or her?

• Are you meeting with your teammate out of class to make sure you both keep up with the material?

• Are you providing help as well as receiving help in about equal measure?

• Are you really listening and respecting your teammate's ideas and suggestions?

• Can you rely on your teammate to do what he or she says he or she will do?

• Can your teammate rely on you to do what you say you will do?

• If you have concerns about how the team is functioning, have you respectfully and gently raised these issues with your teammate?

• If your teammate has concerns about how the team is functioning, have you given these concerns careful consideration and acted on them?

• Have you created a relationship in which both of you look forward to working together with one another?

• If not, what can you do to improve the relationship?

How to Destroy a Team

• Fail to get contact information, ignore your teammate in class, and ignore his or her attempts to communicate with you out of class.

• Make your teammate feel that his or her suggestions are useless, foolish or stupid.

• Ignore suggestions from your teammate.

• Fail to keep up with material, so your teammate can not ask you for help.

• Fail to show up in class, so your teammate has no one to work with during class time.

• Constantly barrage your teammate with requests that he or she show you the answers that he or she has gotten, or share data with you, or let you copy from him or her. Provide little or no help in return.

• Assume that if your teammate has not said anything, whatever you are doing is fine with him or her.

• Blame your teammate for whatever is going wrong, and take no responsibility yourself.

• With or especially without the permission of your teammate, copy results and text, and thus risk the possibility that both of you will be accused of plagiarism.