My colleague Lauren Vicker and I are drafting a book designed to help high school teachers and college professors better design and run team projects. We’ll be posting information here as we progress. Hopefully you find some useful tips!
We have seen, over the years, that many instructors run group and team projects. Too many of them do this by assigning the team project, and then at the end of the semester finding out that things have gone wrong.
But, team projects are not like individual projects. In individual projects, instructors never have to worry about group process – that stuff that happens between assigning the project and getting the results.
Group process can yield some great things! Groups, whether in class or at work, can have “process gains,” or things that happen to make the group even more successful. This type of “synergy” is what instructors, and team leaders at work, hope for.
But, group process also yields “process losses,” or those things that prevent a group from succeeding. We’ve all seen these things occur in our classes – conflict, social loafing, the inability to make decisions, and there are many other problems that occur.
Our upcoming book is designed to help instructors to design, run, track, and assess group projects. Hopefully you’ll find it useful!
Written by Tim Franz, 6/21/19
teambuildingprocess.com 