Course activities often involve teams. One commonly stated claim is: having team projects help teach the students how to work in teams and this will be useful upon graduation. This claim may or may not be true. It depends on many factors that the instructor needs to design, monitor, and control for. It also depends on what happens from the student’s junior to senior year. An individual course focusing on teamwork will not be the answer by itself, learning teamwork will require conscious nurturing throughout a program.

Academia has not really learned from other ‘team’ situations. Think about sports. For a successful team, one does not randomly walk down the street, pick 20-30 individuals at random, declare them to be the country’s Olympic team and shuttle them off immediately to the Olympics and their first game. Teams are picked, they practice, and learn how to be a team before they have to deliver the goods.

A team has a purpose. Team members have roles and each role implies specialized skills, training, practice, coaching, and possibly specialized tools and equipment. The team must have the right types of skills, knowledge, and experience to play the whole game, not just the first five minutes.

There is usually a coach (or a bunch of coaches) to work with the team members and team in skill development and getting the team to work together. Teams often have a mix of experienced and novice players who will share knowledge and insights about how to play the game and how to develop the necessary skills. There are team members who call the plays and direct the action in real-time. There are the plays and strategies called in from the bench.

Does any of this sound like the teamwork we expose students to? Not in our experience. While admittedly rare in the real world, there are companies and organizations where teamwork is taken seriously and the sports model can be seen. These organizations are very effective and efficient.

It is true that many teams in the real world are ill-formed, formed accidentally without reason, have people pitched together without any rhyme or reason, do not have the right skills, knowledge, or experience for the task at hand, do not practice, do not have clear roles, and fumble their way through the project towards the goal. They do indeed get something done, but it might not be appropriate, good enough, nor done in an effective and efficient fashion. Most startups fail. Most innovations fail. Most continuous improvement projects fail. Failure might be partial or full, but there are shortcomings to the critical eye if truth be told. These are all team sports. Most do not have good ‘teams’, or know how to work together as a team. Sadly, the description in this paragraph also fits almost all teams we have seen in courses.

Students will NOT learn teamwork just by being in teams. Or, by having a few, short discussions about teams and teamwork. Or, by having a few contrived ‘teamwork learning’ activities. 

The recipe starts with the freshman year; when the students first encounter post-secondary courses. There should be a conscious and well thought through strategy for how to introduce teamwork in the first year and how this will be reinforced and developed in later terms.

Observations...

• Two courses per term where there are teams and team projects. With junior students, make this one, not two. They need to learn how to work in teams and it is best to do this in a controlled fashion. This is perhaps easier to control and think about in cohort situations. In theory though, there should not be more than two courses per term having team projects at the term level. And, this is true throughout the program. There can be minor team deliverables in a term (e.g., 1-2 week tasks), but the number of term level projects should be controlled.

• Team members should be randomly assigned at the start of term, and the team is the team for the whole term. The same team has to work on multiple tasks if teamwork is actually going to be learned and the skills developed.
• For class level or weekly activities, fresh teams should be created for some, and in some the term teams should be used.
• The courses need to be coordinated with respect to the way teams are managed and run.
• There should be one large team activity for the term; 4-5 students per team.
• The team activities should start in the first or second week of the term and there should be 3-4 activities within the first 4-6 weeks.
• Part of the team’s term deliverables are project plans, status update reports, and personal logs. What they did, when they did it.
• Part of any task > 4 hours should also have mini plans, updates, and personal logs.
• All team tasks should include reflections. At the individual and team levels. What has gone well, what has not gone well, why, and how to avoid, minimize, or mitigate in the future.
• Every 3-4 weeks, a debriefing should be held with the class about lessons learned, methods or tips for better teamwork. A final debrief should be held at the end of term.
• Reflections and notes about ‘lessons learned’ should appear on other assessments such as midterms. This helps in getting individual feedback, and to emphasize that such topics and issues are worthy (i.e., only those activities for which there are marks will be taken seriously).
• Peer evaluations should be carefully done (we actually do not recommend them in general) and concepts from Social comparison theory understood. There are many issues with this practice that need to be understood and controlled for. Superficially, the practice might look attractive, but the practice does not stand up when looked at deeper; in our opinion. There are situations where it might work, but with cohort based programs, there are additional issues and social dynamics to consider. Social comparison theory is key to understanding how individuals will view each other. In addition, the possible biases and issues noted by Kahneman et al. (2021) need to be considered when thinking about when the peer evaluation is done, and how it is done.

Co-dependencies & The Necessary and Hopefully Sufficient

• The students need time to learn both teamwork and to deliver the desired goal of the project.

• Teamwork must be viewed as a collection of cognitive skills and each skill must be explicitly and consciously developed through deliberate practice and coaching.
• There cannot be more than two term team projects per term. Students cannot effectively manage a high quality product if there are more than two. They can flail and deliver something, but the quality will be low and the cost high.
• There needs to be practice and repetition so that the students can learn to work as a team before it is too late in the term.
• There needs to be valued reflection and debriefing. One way to do this is constructive failure; let the students follow Darwin for a bit and then discuss alternative and better ways. The students will understand the issues and some will be interested in avoiding repetitions of past failures.
• Deliverables need to focus on team processes, not just team outcomes. The ‘how’ needs to be exposed and assessed; not just the final deliverable.
• The teamwork activities need to be carefully designed for load and existing knowledge and skills. Push the students a little bit past their comfort zone, but still make it reasonable for the average team to pull off an average result with average effort and cost.
• Team size must be chosen such that the size is not optimal for flailing processes (e.g., the students will get in each other’s way). Pick a team size so that if they actually think about roles and have their act together with good project, time, and risk management, the team activities will be reasonably smooth. For debriefing and reflection purposes, it might be necessary to discuss the ‘better’ way to allocate roles and deal with the assigned number of individuals 3-4 weeks after the project activity has started.
• Lastly, if you are trying to teach the better way to do teamwork, remember that the students should have a burner exercise first, the warmup, learning how to work together from start to finish before the 'big show'. Teams need one or more practice sessions to learn how to work as a team, to gel. Remember the sports analogy noted above!

Further reading

• Kahneman, D., Sibony, O. and C.R. Sunstein (2021) Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Little, Brown, Spark.
• Lingard, R., adn S. Barkataki (2011). Teaching Teamwork in Engineering and Computer Science. 41st ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference.
• Tarricone, P. and J. Luca, (2002). Successful teamwork: A case study, in Quality Conversations, Proceedings of the 25th HERDSA Annual Conference, Perth, Western Australia, pp 640-646.