Teamwork skills are highly valued by employers but most faculty have not been trained to create effective team projects.

In this episode, we discuss a resource faculty can use to create more effective team assignments and projects.

Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist...

...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer...

...and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

Our guests today are Tim Franz and Lauren Vicker.

Tim is a Professor in the Psychology Department at St.

John Fisher University and Lauren is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media and Communication, also at St.

John Fisher University.

They are the authors of Making Team Projects Work: A College Instructor’s Guide to Successful Student Groupwork which has been recently released by Routledge.

Welcome back, Tim and Lauren.

Thanks for having us.

Really appreciate being here.

Yeah, it's great to be back.

Lauren, are you drinking tea?

I am drinking tea.

I am drinking my favorite morning brew, which is Typhoo.

Their tagline is great British tea since 1903, so there's a big history there.

Nice.

And Tim?

Well, I am drinking the same thing as last time you had me on.

And though Lauren is talking about morning tea, I have switched over to my decaf green tea, which I drink in the afternoon.

And especially with how cold it is here in upstate New York, as you both know, I'm using it to warm my hands too.

It's a good solution for that, for sure.] And Rebecca?

I have a London Fog.

Is that another one you bought in London?

Yes.

I figured.

Although, coming soon, teas from Switzerland.

Ohh.

I finally unpacked them.

Well, I just have a Prince of Wales tea from my local Wegmans.

So we invited you here today to discuss your most recent book, Making Team Projects Work.

First, though, can you tell us a little bit about your long-term collaboration?

So I was at St.

John Fisher already for a couple of decades, when Tim arrived, and the Department of Media and Communication, we had a course in small group communication, we called it, and the Psychology Department had a course called group dynamics, and some students were talking about, “Hey, they do a lot of the same things over in Psych.” So I looked up Tim, and we started talking and looking at the classes, and decided that there was enough overlap that we could offer it, co-teaching it, so that it would be cross listed between psychology and communications, and the more we started teaching and coming up with ideas, the more we realized that there was a need out there to talk more about groups and teams, especially in classroom settings.

So that kind of just started the whole thing where we were working together and just had a great time.

It was fun to bounce ideas off each other for every class, and we were always there for all of the work with the students.

And that's been a long-term collaboration, hasn't it?

Yes, we started working together years ago.

I think, Lauren, the first time we taught together was like 2004, 2003.

It was a long time ago, and we co-taught together for a long time before we realized we have more to contribute than just co-teaching.

And how did this new book project come about?

Well, we had started off, as you both know, from last time, we started off with two self-published books when we first started the project, which was born out of us thinking about how what we had done really applies to other people.

And then we did a quick survey of, I think we had about 300 faculty members answer our survey, and realized that a lot of people don't know how to run team projects well, but to keep the books inexpensive, we self published them on Amazon, and then we learned that marketing is hard, very hard, and so we decided to move the book over to a publisher.

And we got picked up.

We chose Rutledge Taylor and Francis publisher.

Both of us had past experience with them with other books, and so it was a real good synergy, and it’s been a great working relationship with them as well.

So we moved it over to a book with a publisher to help make the marketing better, really.

Right, and the big difference too is that we had a separate book for students, and Routledge wanted us to combine them.

So in this new book, they are both together, the faculty version as well as the student handouts.

That's great.

As you alluded to earlier, one of the NACE competencies is the development of skills in teamwork.

But have many faculty received training in how to effectively assist students in developing the skills necessary?

Well, we didn't ask that question specifically in the survey, but we assume that not very many have received formal training.

For example, there are a lot of schools, especially graduate programs, in medical education that uses team-based learning.

Which is a very structured way to use teams in the classroom, and people learn how to set up teams there and how to do the TBL process, but they don't get a lot of those group dynamic things that we like to talk about, like, what do you do when the team is in conflict?

Or how do you have a team work most effectively if you're teaching an asynchronous online class?

Those sorts of things that we realized are gaps.

But we also found that there are still many, many faculty who are just lecturing, and they tell us, “Well, that's the way I like to teach,” you know, that old sage on the stage sort of thing.

And so, we feel that there's such a need out there, and that's a lot of what we're trying to do is get the word out.

Yeah, what we found in that survey is that there is a sizable, I'm not going to say majority, but a sizable number of faculty who are actually resistant to doing group work or teamwork in the classroom because they say it's too hard and doesn't work.

But honestly, our interpretation is that they're not doing it well enough yet, that if they made some very slight changes to what they do, they could pretty easily improve their group work, their teamwork in their classes.

And as you said, the NACE survey and also recent surveys by AAC&U, they also put teamwork as the number one or number two things that employers want.

So as faculty members, we think it's really important to help prepare our students to be better team members, and so that's what we want out of this work.

So one of the reasons we tried to make the book inexpensive was because we wanted students and faculty to be able to use it very easily.

So who is the target audience?

Is it designed just for faculty, or is it for faculty and students as well?

Or are the handouts just a supplement for faculty to use with students?

Well, the book is designed for college professors, and we want to point out it's at every level, from, you know, entering community college, all the way through professional and doctoral programs, anyone can use the information in the book, the student handouts, you wouldn't probably ask the students to buy a copy of the book.

The student handouts are available for the faculty to use to supplement what they're doing, and we have those available.

We share those with people in a format where they can make copies and that sort of thing, if they want to do that.

But the target audience is, for the most part, college professors, although I have to say we did a whole series about what works best in teams with young professionals, former students of ours who were working, and it was a great series because they showed that the concepts that we talk about, yeah, in academia, but there are people who are working professionally who need those tips as well, especially if they haven't had any formal training in how to direct a team or how to manage co workers.

There are a lot of assumptions, that we're maybe just born with the ability to work in teams, or that you walk into a classroom and have those skill sets, and most of the time, people have never been trained in any kind of way about how to work in a group.

Exactly.

Throughout your book, you rely on a systems input-process-output model.

Can you provide our listeners with an overview of this model?

So the input-process-output model comes from really engineering and other types of areas like that, where you bring inputs in, you process the data, you have outputs that come out.

And it was applied years ago by Steiner and many others in the group dynamics literature.

So it's actually not a new model.

It's one that's in the small-group communication and small-group decision making, small-groups literature, and it says that there are things that people bring, the inputs to a group, and then there's the stuff that happens in the group, and then there's what the group gets out of it.

And so the inputs are things like the contexts that people are embedded in, the skills that the team members have, or the task that they're working on, which turns out to be really important, and the processes are what happens when they're working together.

So this is the good and the bad.

It's the conflict that happens, that people run into.

It's the decision making processes, but it's also where somebody says something and somebody else has another idea, and you get some synergies.

So, it's all the things that happen when they're working together.

Now, in the outputs, as professors, what we're often concerned about is the task-related outputs.

What can we give them a grade on?

What is the objective thing that they're working on, but there's also a lot of social outputs that people get.

I mean, we're social animals by nature, and people get a lot of social outputs.

Get to know people.

In fact, I always like to say, at my nephew's wedding, my nephew and his wife met at Keuka college during a team project.

That was their initial meeting.

And I say, well, sometimes you might even get married after your team project and have two kids.

There are other things that people get.

That's the input-process-output model.

And in the book, we literally walk through each part of the input, each part of the process, each part of the output, so that people can see where to improve their teams, both faculty members and students.

And this was also the structure of the way that we taught our group dynamics class.

So one thing we acknowledge is we had the luxury of teaching a whole class in how to make teams work better.

And so a lot of times we know that faculty have so much content to cover that they can't do a whole week talking about leadership in teams, so that's one of the things that we're trying to help them do.

But we taught this way, and I was going through some old notes from my PhD dissertation back at the University of Pittsburgh, and I actually found a model that looked quite similar to the input-output model based on small group communication.

So it's something that's been with us for a long time.

We feel it gives people the idea of how to organize their thinking about teams and how to make them work better.

Throughout the book, in each of your chapters, you have a common structure.

Could you give our listeners an overview of what that structure looks like?

I'll start this because I like to tell a story.

And speaking of stories… when we wrote the self published version, we had every story in every chapter begin with somebody by the name of Fred and Lauren and I, you'll see us laughing when we use that word, that was not his real name.

But I mean, this is back in 2004, 2006 when we first started working together, we had that student who did, not all the things, but caused struggles with his team again and again and again.

So we love to use that Fred name, even though it's not in the new book, we've switched the names around, because it reminds us that there are times where you have those one or two students who cause their teams to struggle.

And so now the stories are really a conglomeration of multiple experiences, not just from us, but from other faculty members we've talked to, interviewed, it comes from our discussions with them.

So each one starts with a story to try to show people it's real, it's honest.

This is what, as a faculty member, even a faculty member who wrote the book and does this, I had a Fred last semester, even with all the procedures, it still happens.

And we've all had students like Fred at some point.

I bet you some of us have colleagues named Fred.

That's certainly true.

So we start with a story, and then we have some reflection questions, asking the reader to think about, has this ever happened to you?

What did you do?

What would you recommend if you knew someone in this situation?

And then we go into the content for that particular chapter and talk about what things are most important, what some of the issues are, and then how to resolve some of those issues.

And the second section of each chapter is the student section.

And so this is basically just a pared down version of the instructor section.

It includes some content and theory and that sort of thing, but it mostly includes the activities for students to do.

So that's where we have handouts where the professor can make copies and put students into teams and have them do that.

So that is the basic framework for each of the chapters.

And starting with a narrative can be a really effective way of engaging people and making the issues memorable.

Can you talk a little bit about some of the student activities that you just mentioned that come in the form of handouts and things?

So, in each chapter, we have activities that really are focused on the content in that chapter.

Some of them require the students to reflect.

Some of them are specific activities to help them develop.

So, for instance, one that we love, and it's a great icebreaker, is the group IQ test, and we use that right away, where they take an IQ test, really not an IQ test, as you can imagine, but they take a little, I think it's 13 item quiz, individually, and then they take it again as a group, and watch how much differently they do in a group versus when they were doing it individually.

And it helps them to see sometimes an individual does better than the group, sometimes the group does better than any of the individuals, and what causes that?

It's a real good way to get people thinking about group work and teamwork.

But we also have exercises.

Again, in every chapter, there's exercises that help to hit that content home.

For the faculty members, for example, we have an exercise about how to create a team task, which is really something.

It's one of the inputs.

And any task we use as professors really needs to be focused on a team and not an individual, and there is a difference about that.

In the leadership chapter, students can take leadership assessments and see how they rate themselves, and that way, that will foster a discussion in the team about should we pick a leader, or should we have shared leadership, and what are we going to do if we've got a conflict with the leader?

And so we try to make all of the activities relevant to whatever is in the content of that particular chapter.

One of the things you talk about in the book is best practices in terms of how to form teams.

What are some of your recommendations for that?

I know students generally prefer picking their own teams, but you argue that that's probably not a very good strategy.

Could you talk a little bit about that?

Never, never, never let them pick their own teams.

You just don't get the diversity of people, ideas, backgrounds, experiences that you need to really do a great job on a team project.

You need lots of inputs into the team.

And when students pick their own teams, they pick their friends, they pick people that they already know, that they have things in common with, and it really hinders their ability to do a good job, and it also can test the bonds of friendship, because inevitably, they're going to be issues on the team.

And sometimes people think, Well, I'm friends with these people.

I can let this slide, or I can miss this particular meeting, because I know them really well, and they know I'll come through.

And so it's really important… the number one thing is not to let students do that and tell them that at the outset.

At first they're disappointed, but then you explain the importance of having to do it.

So we go on from there to talk about ways that you can put the teams together.

Tim has a good one that I think he can explain about the questionnaire that students use.

So a perfect example this semester, my students, in my… it's called workplace psychology.

In that class, they do a project, and at the beginning of the semester, I was very clear that they're not going to pick their own teams, just like Lauren said, and I used a structured approach for that, which means I give them a questionnaire.

Now I use Qualtrics, an online survey, and I know what skills they need to succeed on this project, and so they have to answer questions, self rating, better than nothing, but they’re self rating their ideas about how they are with writing, with analysis, with organization, with leadership, with working as a team member, and I have more too, but I pick the skills that are necessary for success, and then I make sure that every team is balanced so they have somebody who rated on a five-point scale of four or five in each area, so they can feel comfortable knowing that their team does have the skills to succeed in this project.

And I will tell you, Lauren and I are really passionate about this whole idea of don't let people pick their own teams, find a better way to do it.

And the number one reason, other than all the theoretical reasons, and what the research shows, and if you look in the team based learning literature, they're very clear, and they have the research to back this up.

But there’s a student I had, where I'll just call her Jane, and Jane saw the world a little differently than most of the other students in the class, and I'm still choked up about this because I was swayed.

This is 15 years ago, when I was swayed to let them pick their own team, and nobody picked Jane.

Now Jane was actually a straight A student and really thoughtful and hard working, but Jane was quirky, and nobody picked Jane, and Jane was in tears at the end of the class.

And is really, is that the type of situation we want to set up in our classes.

Our classes should encourage that knowledge diversity.

Bring people in.

That's the whole reason we use teams, is to have a lot of different voices and opinions so that we can make more informed and better decisions.

So let's utilize that.

And the main thing in terms of the students, is to make sure the process is transparent, so they understand how the teams were put together, how they were formed.

I even had one of my public speaking classes, I told them what the

parameters were: you can't pick your own teams, and I let them suggest them.

And it turned out they had a great idea.

We made sure that people from different majors were in teams together, and that people who had different experiences in the field of public speaking, how much they had already done coming into the class.

And it turned out those were great teams.

So it's just making sure that the students understand that this is what's important.

And remember, when they get into their professional settings, you don't have a choice of who you're going to work with.

You're in a certain work group, or have a certain manager you report to, and that's the group that you have to work with.

You have to learn how to work with them.

So it's really good training for the future.

And I forgot to close the loop about workplace psychology, because they did tell me in mid-November that they were really bummed that they didn't get to pick their own teams at the beginning of the semester, but they loved by mid-November that we did it the way we did, because they knew they could all succeed on the project, and they actually admitted that they met some new people.

So it worked out well, I don't know if anybody's getting married like my nephew.

One of the things you advocate for is the formation of team charters.

Can you talk a little bit about what a team charter is and what they should address?

So we let the students know that it's important that they set up some guidelines at the beginning of the semester.

Occasionally, we've actually done this with the class, where we've put the students in teams and have them generate some norms that they think should govern their discussions, and we'll post that on the course management system, and then if something's going wrong, we can always go back to it.

A team charter is a little more formal, but when a team is working on a big project, it's a good idea for them to sit down and decide how they're going to run things.

Are they going to, for example, set up a common meeting time, which we really stress, that students look at their schedules and figure out all of their other responsibilities.

When can they meet every week outside of class?

They have to have a common meeting time, and that's really important.

How are they going to handle conflict?

How are they going to make decisions?

Tim and I, this week we're doing a LinkedIn series on problem solving and this week, we've been talking about decision rules.

Is it going to be majority rule?

Students like to do majority rule.

But then, if you're in a five-person group and you're in the two that don't get your choice, how committed are you going to feel to the decision?

So do you want to work with consensus?

Are you going to appoint one leader or are you going to rotate leadership.

What are you going to do when you get stuck?

Are you going to go to the professor first, or are you going to try to work it out yourselves?

So all of those things, and in the team charter, it's great if the students actually write those things down and have everyone in the team sign off on it, because it gives them something they can go back to later on, when inevitably, they've got some issue they need to work out.

I actually did a presentation, Lauren is on the presentation, just about a year and a half ago, at NITOP, the National Institute for Teaching of Psychology, about how to do those charters and one way I do them, and this is what I talked about at NITOP, is working it around our obligations to one another, rather than our expectations of one another, it's what we owe one another.

And it puts a different spin on it, and allows people to see that, for their group to succeed, they have to do something.

It's not what they get from others, but what they have to do and what they owe, so and again, this is something that I presented and Lauren wasn't at the conference, but we're both on the conference presentation for that.

One of the things you've already talked about is having these team charters as a way of reducing the likelihood of problems and also perhaps providing a simpler way of resolving them, since they had all agreed to it.

But are there other things that instructors can do to help resolve issues of shirking by individual members, because that's one of the most common problems we see with teamwork.

So I'm going to say two things, and I'm sure Lauren will have even more than this, because we have so many ideas to help with this, that lack of motivation, that free riding, social loafing, that happens in so many teams.

So I'll just talk about two and then Lauren, you can add on.

But number one is creating a task, a team task, that has meaning to it that doesn't just seem like a project that we have to do to get a grade in the class, because if the students find meaning, especially if that project has some community impact that goes beyond the classroom.

By the way, having a community partner, it's wonderful for team projects, because it really does make students realize the importance of the work they're doing.

So once you add that importance factor into your team project, that it's meaningful, it's worth something, that helps right away.

So as an instructor, that's the number one thing is when you're designing the project, make sure it has some impact that the students see that can help them get a job or help a community organization or something like that.

And number two is ongoing peer evaluation, and we stress this in our book again and again, that peer evaluation needs to be not just at the end, when we're giving our final grade, where in finals week, we collect the peer evaluation sheets and then put it on some learning management system.

They wouldn't know what they're going to get.

Instead, peer evaluation is something that you should do in an ongoing basis at least three times in the semester, and in my class that I'm teaching right now, I did it 10 times.

And so it was every week they did peer evaluation, and they got feedback every week on their peer evaluation.

So this way they can see what they're doing and know how to change it, and know where they can improve, the developmental, formative opportunities that we all want to give our students.

So, keeping team small is one way to reduce shirking or social loafing, because it's a lot harder to hide when there are fewer people in the team.

And a lot of the research says five to seven is good, but it depends on what the project is and what the class is like.

I've had three person teams that have worked really well with projects.

So, keeping the team small, checking in, checking in, checking in, so not just having them evaluate each other and maybe giving them time to talk about those peer evaluations, which are sometimes really hard discussions to have if somebody's not measuring up or doing what they had signed on to do, but instructor checking in, finding out what's happening, giving students a few minutes at the end of class to talk about their projects, and just walking around and hearing what they have to say.

We've also done more formal check-ins, where we've given surveys and have them just indicate where they are in the project.

And we've done this sometimes with anonymous surveys.

And one time we had, “Have you already picked your topic?” We were two weeks in, and half the teams hadn't picked their topic yet, and there was a whole process just for picking topic, getting permission, because it did involve people outside of the classroom.

So we were like, “Okay, guys, you really need to get through this.” And we needed to, on a regular basis, we need to go over what those deadlines were for those sorts of things that they were doing.

One of the things that we also did to kind of keep watch on what they were doing, is we set up a Google folder for each team in one of our classes with instructor access, and everyone had to write in the folder each week what they had done for the project.

And sometimes they would write, “Well, I had a lacrosse tournament, so I didn't get anything done, but this week I'm going to do this.” We're like, “Okay, you get a pass for this week.” But if I look and see someone hasn't read, hasn't put anything into the Google folder for three weeks, like, how much are you contributing?

What's your role?

And are you letting the team down by not following through?

So it's a great way to keep track of what's going on and to avoid that, because it is a problem, people shirking.

One of the big things that we hear is, “Oh, I end up doing all the work because people are contributing.” Dang it, Fred.

So when faculty are using a mix of individual and team assignments, what helps determine whether an assignment is more appropriate for an individual or for a team?

Well, on that one, if it's something that can be easily broken up, divided up, and each person can take apart and then smush it back together.

It's really not a team assignment.

That's an individual assignment that's broken up for a group to do.

And one of our pet peeves, and oh, I'm not going to speak for Lauren here, but I have so many of them, is that presentation, when you get to the end, and it's a group project, and slide one looks one way, and slide two looks another way, and slide three looks totally different.

And, by the way, covers some of the same things that were on slide one.

Yeah, that's a group project or an individual assignment that's been shoved together.

So a team assignment has to be fairly difficult.

It's okay to add some challenge to it.

So we have to make it challenging.

It has to have a lot of ways to get to the end point.

It can't be one single way, by the way, fancy word: path multiplicity.

And there has to be lots of different endpoints that could all be successful.

That's solution multiplicity, and these are the important parts.

It also needs to force students to use those different skills.

It needs to require that they collaborate to succeed.

I think the importance of interdependence in the project is probably the thing that will help you realize whether or not it's a good team project.

Doing a research paper, that's for an individual.

And one of the issues that we often see with people who aren't used to using teams and are maybe starting out is they might take an individual project and give it to a group and say, “okay, here, do this, “and especially as classes get bigger in some institutions, they might think, “Oh, it's easier.

Instead of giving this paper, I give this research paper assignment to a team,” but it's not the kind of thing that can be done effectively, and they really need to be designed specifically for teams.

And there are lots of great team assignments out there, and we have a bunch in our book and on our website.

I mean, we give away a lot of this content, so there are lots of ways that you can get help if you're looking to make an effective team assignment and also give feedback to each other as well.

Can you give just one example of a really good team assignment?

I know that's hard when I say one.

One is hard.

I mean, we've had so many that have been just really interesting to see what happens.

My favorite one is when we had the students actually pick a group on campus, a team, and do a communication analysis, or a small group analysis of their process.

And for example, we decided to keep it on campus because it was starting to get too unwieldy to manage.

But they would have to go to say, a student club, like the Student Government Association Executive Committee, and say, “We have to observe your meeting at least three times.

Can we get your permission?” So that was one of the first steps, pick a group, get permission, and we would make sure that people could remain anonymous, although if it's the president of SGA, everybody kind of knows who that person is, but they would observe these meetings.

They would have to collect data.

Some of them would do a communication analysis, or they would do a leadership assessment.

They always did post-meeting evaluations by the team members.

How did it go?

That sort of thing.

And one of the challenges for them was not only getting the team, getting to these meetings, but deciding what data were they going to collect?

So that was a whole big decision, because we gave them reams of instruments that they could use, and then it culminated in a report back to the class.

They had a portfolio of all the information that they had collected, and they did an oral team presentation to the class.

And one of my favorite parts was that each team had another team that they had to peer evaluate, and so when they were done, they had a chance to give them feedback as well.

So at the final meeting of the semester, we asked students like: “What did you learn about the team?

What'd you learn about yourself as a team member?” And I just thought it was a great way to use it, and we called them group dynamic consultants, or something like that, that they came in and did that.

So, I think that was my favorite.

I think that's a great example, Lauren.

It really required, and this is where we use those different skills to pick the team, It really required somebody who's good in analysis, somebody who's a good leader, somebody who can talk to the client well, and all those different things where we want teams to succeed.

They need these skills, and they had to bring them together, each working in their different lane, in their different role, but pulling it together and working together.

What are some ways that faculty can encourage the development of student leadership skills or team leadership skills, through these assignments.

Well, you know, team leadership is so important, and as we're talking about the surveys out there, the NACE survey, the AAC&U survey, these are all talking about the importance of leadership skills.

A Carnegie organization now has the LPP, the leadership for a public purpose, designation for schools, and this is something where schools can do better to structure leadership opportunities for their students.

And a team project is the perfect place.

Now, what's really nice about a team project is that the leadership, and Lauren said this earlier, the leadership needs to be shared and needs to rotate to some extent.

So it's a really good place for different students to get those small-group leadership skills, different from somebody who's up on a public stage or a politician who has to show a vision.

These small group leadership skills are where our students can start to develop in a very safe way, an environment where they're getting feedback and development opportunities, where they're not going to feel like their job is at risk in these little groups.

And by the way, I'm going to say that that's just not the case for team projects.

It's also the case for the group work in your class when you have, and we do, Lauren and I use those terms differently, a team project: long standing, they're working together more collaboratively.

But there's a lot of times where Lauren and I would throw in a group project, a group exercise one day, and we'd shuffle the groups up.

And I still do this.

And even in those small-group situations, having somebody step in to be the leader, having somebody picked to be the leader, have that rotate, make sure different people get those skills.

So it's a great way for us as educators of future leaders to help people to develop the skills in a psychologically safe manner.

And one of the things that we stress to the students really continuously, but leadership is a really good example of how do you answer a question when you get to a job interview about leadership.

So if you go in and they say, “Well, tell me about your leadership,” and they say, “Well, I was captain of the tennis team.” Well, yeah, that's an okay example, but it's not the same as saying “I was the team leader in a team project.” And these are the things that we actually had to do, or if they said, “Tell me about a time when you were able to overcome a problem working on a team” and having the leader being able to explain that can be really powerful when they get into a job interview, especially as the job market has gotten tighter and tighter, our students need to have a little bit of an edge when they get into the interview.

And we do have a leadership assessment tool in the book that we've created that anybody can use.

It's for students.

So it's in our student section.

And again, as Lauren said, all those things are available to any users of our book.

We have all those student things, all the student handouts, that people can download.

So the leadership assessment tool is a great one to use, especially if you want to show students how they have developed.

So I have, at times, given that at the beginning of the semester and then given it at the end of the semester again to help them see.

What's funny is, some students will actually go down, but in their reflection about why they went down, they write, “I didn't realize all the things I didn't know.” So they are actually more calibrated by the end, even if they've dropped sometimes.

One of the things that faculty sometimes find challenging is how to do team projects in an online or virtual setting.

Do you have any suggestions for how teams can work well, in those environments?

Oh, we have a lot of ideas.

We do have a whole chapter in the book, and we've written about this in a number of different places.

One of the big things to keep in mind is that it's important to keep the team small in an online class, because the more people you have, the more difficult it can be.

Also need to require the students to set up a time when they can meet together, even virtually, but have a face-to-face kind of meeting time, because if they think they're going to just be able to do the whole project by sending text messages or putting input into a Google Doc, that's going to be pretty challenging to be able to finish that.

So those are two things that I think are important, and I know Tim's done more online teaching than I have, and probably has some more and better ideas.

Well, what Lauren talked about are actually, absolutely, the best ways to start, and that idea of face-to-face time, whether it's Zoom, I don't mean that they need to be in person, because a lot of times I work with students that are in different states, but that face time, that Zoom meeting, whatever it is, to kick off with that and then continue using it, like Lauren said on a regular basis, is great.

Now I do think, as the instructor, we make assumptions.

I am going to admit my age here.

There was no digital work when I started my teaching career, and this is my second career, so it's a very different environment, and our students grew up with this stuff, yet I find that they have no idea about all the tools we have that are available to them.

So as an instructor, you do need to spend a little time helping them to work through the tools.

They see everything as a group chat.

I have to say, you know, not all of them, but so many of the students just say, “Oh, we have a group chat.

That's how we're going to communicate.” And I'm like, “Yeah, it's only one little thing of the many things.” So you have to explain the tools you have, and then, to some extent, teach to those tools, and you have to make sure the students know how to match the tool to the task, because, for instance, if you have conflict in your team, that's not a group chat resolution, that's a phone call or something like that.

It's a different way to deal with that.

So one of the exercises… Rebecca, you asked about the exercises… and one of the exercises we have is what tools do they have, and then how they're going to use those tools to solve different parts of their team project when they're going to use each one.

Now, it always helps to have a leader who's organized and keeping the team on task.

So if you have somebody with online skills and has done this before who's leading the team, that's also helpful.

In an online team, it’s probably more important to have someone who's an official leader, either that the team agrees on of one person, or even that the professor might suggest that this person should be the leader.

And the structure of the project is so important in both online and face-to-face classes, but especially in online, because they actually just need that structure for how they're going to be able to do it without seeing each other all the time.

One of the things I've done when I've had group projects online is to have a discussion forum where students were given some choices in terms of what types of projects they could do, and I just had them state what they most preferred to work on, and also what their time availability was so they could match themselves that way.

There wasn't as much of an issue with an online class of students knowing each other, because many of them had never met before in other classes, but at least they could try to find some ways in which they could agree on topics, but also do it in a way where they would be available at the same times, because some of the students were working every day, some of the students were working nights, some of the students had a couple of jobs.

Some of the students were taking care of ill relatives, and their time flexibility was limited, but there was always someone else in the class that had similar time constraints, and it worked pretty well.

I will say that I recently had an experience, and to be very personal, I have a daughter who just graduated college, and she had a professor who said, “you have to meet one of these three times,” and she was a D1 athlete and worked outside of school and had a busy life, and none of those times worked with her schedule.

So John, I really like that, because the idea is, let the students set their own times.

Don't pick them for them, because our life is very different.

They may want to meet at 11 o'clock on a Sunday night.

I will be snoring in the recliner by then, I guarantee it.

Well, and we also have to consider that in online environments, we might not be in the same time zone.

Exactly.

Our friend Mike Palanski, who's at Rochester Institute of Technology, I still remember this so well.

He did one of our video interviews that we posted, and he talked about the importance of calendar courtesy when you're working in online teams.

That was his term.

So Mike says you have to have that calendar courtesy to recognize that it doesn't always have to be at my time on my 9 to 5 schedule when you're working in an international team.

And I will say this is a side note, another personal thing, but once I didn't get to my book club until nine o'clock.

I told them, I have a meeting at eight o'clock.

And they all laughed at me, and they said, “Is he meeting with somebody from India?” And when I got to book club a little after nine, they said, “Oh, you're meeting with somebody from India.” I said, “I am.

I'm meeting with one of my editors on one of my books, who could meet at 8pm and that's what worked for both of us.

It was in the morning for her.” Now, yes, you do have to have that calendar courtesy, so thanks to Mike Palanski for that.

Do you have any advice for faculty getting started with team projects?

Yes, we do.

So if a faculty member has never done any group work or team projects, we recommend they start small by doing some group work in the classroom, and that can be as simple as taking content for class that day and having discussion questions, or having them do a process called learning through discussion, which is more structured, where students do the reading for the class and then come in and the professor can rotate around and see if the teams are really understanding what it is that they're talking about.

And then when you're ready to move on to a team project, we would recommend that you start small.

So don't start with something semester long, maybe a project that could just take two or three weeks, and start small in terms of the content and also how much you're demanding of the students and how much you're able to follow along with what they're working on.

So we have an article about that in Inside Higher Ed that was published just a couple of months ago about how to start doing a team project.

And we can link to that in the show notes.

So we always wrap up by asking, what's next?

Well, we continue our collaboration, as you've heard already, we've been writing articles, we put out videos on LinkedIn, and our Making Team Projects Work Facebook page at least every week, and sometimes more, and we are going to continue to figure out what's next for our collaboration, with Lauren in Arizona and me in upstate New York, it's actually continued to work really well.

We've got some other things, Lauren, you want to add to that?

Yeah, we have been doing some seminars and workshops for people.

We've been doing a lot of series for LinkedIn.

And this semester, we've been doing just short videos giving quick tips and then linking to some of the other items that we have on our website and in the book.

So we've got lots of content out there, and we've been to a few conferences.

One of the conferences that we talked about the idea of moving from doing a lecture to working on teams was at the Team-Based Learning Collaborative, because if you don't have a requirement that people use team-based learning, sometimes it's really hard to get your colleagues interested in doing that.

So we have worked on that sort of thing, moving from lecture to using teams and giving people those tools that they can take with them.

Well, thank you.

It's been great talking to you again, and one of the suggestions I'd make for those people getting started is picking up a copy of your book.

Thank you.

We'd be very happy.

Thank you so much for having us, and we really appreciate the time.

And again, all the student resources are available for anybody who has the book.

We're happy to share those so you can download them and use them.

And it's great to have your book to provide that structured learning opportunity for how to make teams.

Oh, thank you.

That's great to hear.

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Music by Michael Gary Brewer.