Manage student expectations for their team project 

How you introduce the team project to your students can affect their attitude towards the project. Some students may feel ambivalent or even have a negative reaction when the instructor announces a team project. Oftentimes, this is because they have had a prior negative experience with a team project or because they don’t fully understand the purpose of the current project, or they aren't sure how the project will benefit them in now or later. Understanding the causes of student resistance to teamwork helps us to address concerns and lay a foundation from which learners can to invest emotionally and academically in the project.

• Tell students on the first day of class (or before class) that they will be working on a team project. Include this information in the course syllabus. A syllabus statement is one way to do this.
• Elicit student attitudes towards teamwork on the first day of class. You could ask them about their previous experiences in teamwork have been, both good and bad. This can take the form of an online or paper survey, small group discussions, or a whole class discussion. Be sure to ask students to share specific examples of the good and bad, and to suggest what they would change to convert something bad to something better. Collect and display the information you receive and use this to facilitate a conversation about what they would like from their fellow students and the instructor to ensure that their project will be successful.
• Be transparent. Ensure that you and your students share an understanding of what effective teamwork looks like and show them how the project fits into your course learning outcomes. It is also helpful to be transparent about the assignment's purpose, intended audience, and the tasks they will be required to complete along the way.

CoLT Categories

To reduce the effort required to locate an appropriate CoLT, we have organized the techniques into six broad categories:

• Discussion - Student interaction and exchange is achieved primarily through spoken words.
• Reciprocal Peer Teaching - Students purposefully help each other master subject matter content and develop discipline-based skills.
• Problem Solving - Students focus on practicing problem-solving strategies.
• Graphic Information Organizers - Groups use visual tools to organize and display information. Writing Students write to learn important course content and skills.
• Games - Students work together in teams to participate in a competitive activity that is guided by a preexisting set of rules.

These categories represent our best attempt at sorting the techniques into sets that share fundamental commonalities, yet the dividing lines are not precise. For example, in the writing CoLTs we include CoLT 27: Peer Editing. This is a technique in which students critically review and provide editorial feedback on each other's essay, report, argument, research paper, or other writing assignment. One could make a case that this technique might be better included in reciprocal peer teaching, but we included it in the writing section because students write a response to another student's paper and thus learn to evaluate their own work.

"There's no perfect way to configure student groups, and that just circles back to those big contextual challenges, or situational factors that we have when we're designing our classes. I remember Prabhani mentioning students in different time zones. How do you have students work in groups when they're in different time zones? Maybe you want to group your students based on time zone or help them get together based on their availability. This happened to me when I was teaching a course with a lot of student athletes where they had really restricted free time. And so those kinds of things are ways that we can imagine configuring student groups... prioritizing those biggest issues that are going to have be hurdles for students in our teaching... as much as we can lower the logistical barriers to helping them do that hard work of working together,

"I use a mix of individual and collective assessments. Because, in my the way that I look at it is the group project is there to sort of facilitate student interactions and to improve individual understanding. Because...in statistics classes, specifically, we have students coming from very diverse backgrounds, and because they might also be taking different types of statistics classes when they're actually coming towards the capstone class. So the group project would require them to interact with each other and maybe perhaps even teach each other some of the things... If you just use individual assessments, I think that would discourage people from interacting. But on the other hand, if you only have collective assessments, then that could be somewhat unfair to stronger students. So I think a mix would be the way to go. "

Unfortunately, groups can easily end up being less, rather than more, than the sum of their parts. Why is this?

In this section, we consider the hazards of group projects and strategies instructors can use to avoid or mitigate them. Find other strategies and examples here or contact the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence for help.

For students, common challenges of group work include:

• Coordination costs
• Motivation costs
• Intellectual costs

For instructors, common challenges involve:

• Allocating time
• Teaching process skills
• Assessing process as well as product
• Assessing individual as well as group learning

At some point in your education, you will likely be asked to work on a group project with your classmates or with a partner. You may be asked to take on a certain role or perform a specific task to complete the project. 

Working on a team is different than working on your own. We have some suggestions to help you contribute and feel like part of the group.

The Pace is Too Fast

If your group members are talking quickly, it's okay to ask questions to clarify what they said:

"Sorry, I didn't catch that."

"Could you repeat that?"

"Can you explain that?"

"What do you mean by…?"