Tips for Successful Team Management

Teamwork can increase knowledge and skills in ways that enhance individual learning. Teams need to be formed, guided, and managed carefully and deliberately in order to achieve desired learning objectives.

Here are some additional tips that can increase the likelihood of success of teamwork techniques as paraphrased by Oakley, et al. (2004) and Felder & Brent (2016, p. 255).

  • Clearly establish team policies and expectations and follow consistently throughout the course.

  • Make the team assignment too challenging to be completed individually. This necessitates group members to rely on each other.

  • Define unique and distinct roles for team members (e.g., coordinator, recorder, monitor).

  • Allow students to bring their unique expertise to the team or provide supplementary training for unique technical contributions.

  • Give bonus points for good team performance on tests.

  • In oral reports, arbitrarily assign team members to report on different parts of the project. All team members should be able to explain various parts of the project.

  • Collect one final product per team but adjust the team grade for individual performance.

  • Ensure individual student accountability:

    • Give individual tests on project content

    • Monitor individual understanding

    • Give credit only to active participants using team signatures

    • Use peer ratings to adjust team project grades for individual performance (see Peer Assessment Rubric for Group Projects)

    • Provide last resort options of firing and quitting

    • Use self-assessment strategies to monitor progress

  • Explain how and why teamwork is being used.

  • Deal with difficulties as they arise using active listening and conflict resolution. This may be performed as an in-class-crisis-clinic or out-of-class-special-cause as deemed appropriate.

Felder, R. M., & Brent, R. (2016). Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. https://iucat.iu.edu/catalog/16014698

Oakley, B., Brent, R., Felder, R., & Elhajj, I. (2004). Turning Student Groups into Effective Teams. Journal of Student Centered Learning. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.422.8179&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Scaffolding

Why do students ask what’s going to be on the exam?  This question can come after you have: 

  • placed learning objectives in your syllabus, 

  • provided students with a course packet, and 

  • spent weeks lecturing and providing lab or discussion activities related to what is going to be on the exam.

As college-level instructors, we have high expectations for our subjects and our students. However, we can forget what it’s like to be a learner in their first or second year of college, especially if we didn’t struggle with passing courses in high school or during our undergraduate experience. Students come to college at all different levels in a variety of different subjects, and can get overwhelmed, particularly if they did not develop the type of study skills that are needed to be successful in college. It can be useful to some students to explain how to incorporate strategies into your course content, whenever possible to help students be successful in the first- and second-year courses you teach. One such approach is Scaffolding.

 To achieve these high expectations, we should aim high and build in scaffolds for all students to reach the top level, as suggested by Oakley, et al., (2021, pp. 27-29) and Tomlinson and Javius (2012).During scaffolded instruction, students move incrementally (via ‘scaffolds’) towards a deeper understanding of material and concept, enabling them to gradually build understanding. Consider how the learning styles approach can help to scaffold instruction to support and enhance student learning. The scaffolding strategies below can reach all types of learners, considering differences in learning styles, learning speeds, and memory capacities (Alber, 2011 and “Scaffolding,” n.d.):

Resources:

Alber, R. (2011, May 24). 6 Scaffolding Strategies to Use With Your Students [Web log post]. Retrieved June 24, 2020, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/scaffolding-lessons-six-strategies-rebecca-alber

Oakley, B., Rogowsky, B., & Sejnowski, T. J. (2021). Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn. New York, NY: Tarcher Perigee. https://iucat.iu.edu/catalog/19574677

Tomlinson, C. A., & Javius, E. L. (2012). Teach Up for Excellence. Educational Leadership, 69(5), 28-33. Retrieved April 05, 2021, from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb12/vol69/num05/Teach-Up-for-Excellence.aspx

Office Hours Revisited

We have talked in the past about tips for making office hours equitable and accessible for students. 

This post adds to the conversation with a few best practices. The following are adapted from Vanderbilt University “Office Hours and Email” (n.d.) and Northern Illinois University  (NIU)“Connecting with Students in Online Courses” (n.d.). NIU notes that there are typically two types of students who actively seek out office hours: high achieving students and struggling students.

For high achieving students, office hours can be motivational—individualized faculty attention and support can further enhance their achievements.

For the struggling students, office hours can be supportive, with faculty offering individualized guidance and insights on how the student may improve.

By making a personal connection, you can motivate all types of learners to succeed. Getting to know your students will also give you the opportunity to understand how the course is going and how you might adjust your instruction to improve learning.

Some of the recommendations from Griffin, W. et. al., (2014) study to understand why students do not attend office hours included faculty “educating” students as to the benefits of office hours and making office hours as accessible as possible.

Tips that align with these suggestions include:

  • Find the right place and time.

    • Consider holding office hours in a student-friendly location on campus, or virtually.

    • Provide clear instructions on how to locate your office hours(face-to-face or virtual) at the appropriate time.

  • Reiterate the availability of office hours throughout the course and offer scheduled appointments for mutual convenience to promote attendance.

  • Require a visit, preferably early in the course. If the visit is to discuss some course issue, say possible term paper or project topics, that conversation can show students the value of meeting with the prof. They get good feedback on the topic they’re considering, get ideas about other options, and can ask questions about assignment details.

  • Encourage students to come and help them prepare for meetings.

    • Let them know what materials or information would be helpful to have access to during office hours.

    • Tell them how to submit files prior to office hours (if necessary).

  • In addition to course topics, consider promoting discussions about careers, internships, research experiences and degrees in your field.

Inside Higher Ed Reminds us that virtual office hours benefit the following:

Students who don’t live on the campus. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 76 percent of all undergraduate students lived off campus — either on their own or with their parents — while taking classes in 2016, the latest year for which those data are available. Living off the campus creates many challenges for students if only in-person office hours are offered. If office hours mean finding transportation (either public or private), then navigating through the campus and often a labyrinthine academic office building, and then perhaps having to wait, students will reasonably begin to evaluate whether their question or concern is “worth it.” Virtual office hours place these students on equal footing with their on-campus peers, allowing them to engage with the instructor without conducting a cost-benefit analysis of their time, money and effort.

First-generation students. The challenges first-generation students face are significant enough that they must discover what Buffy Smith has termed the “hidden curriculum.” Part of that includes their intimidation of one-on-one interactions with their professors. Your office, however, you might attempt to make it inviting, is still a foreign, rather scary place to many students. Virtual office hours, in contrast, allow students to remain in an environment where they feel comfortable yet can still build a relationship with their instructor.

Students with jobs. Turning once again to the National Center for Educational Statistics, 43 percent of full-time students were employed in 2018, of which 27 percent worked more than 20 hours a week. The pandemic has been destroying the economies of many college towns, including the businesses that employ students during their studies. Student employment will probably continue to be unstable in terms of scheduling and hours even after we return to fully in-person learning. Students need every bit of flexibility that they can get and offering virtual office hours can allow them that flexibility. This is anecdotal, but students have joined from their phones during their commute to work and told me that they would never have been able to make office hours if they were only held in person. This made me wonder, just how many students are we underserving by insisting on in-person office hours?

Students with a disability. Every student should receive the accommodations and accessibility arrangements they require in order to succeed academically and personally at your institution. Students are not always willing to make those disclosures, however, in part due to the perceived effect on their relationship with a faculty member or instructor. Offering only in-person office hours can deny access to many of these students, whether their disabilities are mobility related, psychological or from the lingering fatigue of a COVID-19 infection. Offering virtual office hours allows these students to access faculty one on one and build relationships crucial to learning and academic success while still being empowered as to where, when and to whom they disclose their disability.

Helping students engage in lecture

In an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, James Lane (author of Small Teaching) explains:

“The opening five minutes offer us a rich opportunity to capture the attention of students and prepare them for learning. They walk into our classes trailing all of the distractions of their complex lives — the many wonders of their smartphones, the arguments with roommates, the question of what to have for lunch. Their bodies may be stuck in a room with us for the required time period, but their minds may be somewhere else entirely.

It seems clear, then, that we should start class with a deliberate effort to bring students’ focus to the subject at hand.”

One strategy he advocates for is:

Reactivate what they learned in previous courses. Plenty of excellent evidence suggests that whatever knowledge students bring into a course has a major influence on what they take away from it. So a sure-fire technique to improve student learning is to begin class by revisiting, not just what they learned in the previous session, but what they already knew about the subject matter.

One way you can do this is by posing simple questions at the beginning of class followed by a few minutes of discussion: “Today we are going to focus on X. What do you know about X already? What have you heard about it in the media, or learned in a previous class?”  – Lang explains that this helps students:

  • “connect to your course material, so when they encounter new material, they will process it in a richer knowledge context”

  • It also helps you understand what preconceptions and misconceptions they may have about material.

Weimer (2018) suggests you ask questions about material previously covered. The strategies she suggests include:

  • Resolutely refuse to answer the question. That’s exactly what students want you to do.

  • Give them a hint. “We talked about this when we were talking about X?” “Check your notes for October 20. You might find the answer there.”

  • Be patient. It takes time to retrieve what you’ve just learned and just barely understand.

  • Still no response? Tell them, that’s the question you’ll start with tomorrow and if they don’t have an answer then, they’ll next see that question on the exam.

Have students review previously presented content.

  • “Take three minutes to review your notes from November 1. Do you have anything in your notes that doesn’t make sense to you now?” If someone offers an example, encourage other students to respond. “Help Shandra out. What do the rest of you have in your notes about this?” Conclude by giving them another minute to write more in their notes if they need to.

  • At the beginning or end of the class session, give students the chance to review notes from a designated day with someone sitting nearby. Encourage them to trade notes and then talk about what they do and don’t have that’s the same. What do they both consider the most important material in that set of notes?

Use the text in class

  • If the text offers a good definition, description, graphic, example, sample problem, study question, or something else, tell students you have it highlighted in your text. Ask if they’ve highlighted it in theirs. Then inquire about reasons why it might be highlighted.

  • Identify a key concept discussed several days ago or in a previous module. Start with what’s in their notes. Then ask about text material on the concept. Where’s it located in the text? What’s the relationship between what’s in the text and what was presented? Does the text add new information? Does it provide a different kind of explanation? Does it offer more examples?

Roberto (2021) recommends Creating Meaningful Prework:

Students will also come to class more prepared to contribute if you set the stage with effective prework activities. Reading assignments alone aren’t sufficient, and grades are not enough to motivate. We must broaden our perspective and think creatively about what prework is. The tasks we give students should answer the “So what?” question and require them to grapple with the material in some way, so they’re not blank slates when they get to class. It’s all about preparing them to engage. I’ve found the following tasks to be more effective than assigned readings; ask them to do some of the following:

  • Watch a ShowMe tutorial. This is an Apple app, though there are similar apps for other platforms. ShowMe turns your tablet into a whiteboard so that you can draw and bring in different colors and images as you record your voice. It doesn’t have to be fancy. The key is making a short video that breaks down a concept and readies students to apply that information. We need to get away from posting lengthy lecture videos and expecting students to sit through them.

“Articulating the ‘So what?’ before you hand out an assignment—and including compelling examples that reinforce the subject’s relevance—motivates students to do the work well, not just for the grade.”

  • Listen to an Audacity podcast. With this free software (also available at IUWare), you can record short audio podcasts that students can listen to on the go. My podcasts include a few simple bullet points and reviews of key topics.

  • Conduct interviews. Give students something active to do with the material. Sometimes the most effective prework is having them go out and be anthropologists, to observe or interview people about the topic. It could be someone on campus, out in the community, or even in their own homes.