Teamwork

Teamwork (or “Collaboration” as we call it in the Music Department) is consistently ranked high among 21st-century job skills. However, as Bacon suggests, teamwork and content learning objectives are frequently at cross-purposes, and many assignments focus entirely on content, leaving it to the students to “figure out” teamwork skills on their own. There is some merit in this approach, certainly—it promotes self-reliance—but if teamwork skills are actually an objective, an observation/mentoring model would seem more efficient. I’m still working on this, but in the mean time, I am experimenting with ideas from social identity research in order to foster a sense of unity among team members. Through promoting group salience and inter-group competition, it seems logical that the in-group bias would motivate students to better work. I am still refining the approach, and results have been uneven. I expect to design an action study in the coming years to examine the problem more closely.

(Selected) Teamwork Resources

• Abrams, Dominic and Michael A. Hogg. 1990. “An Introduction to the Social Identity Approach.” In Social Identity Theory: Constructive and Critical Advances, 1-9. New York: Harvester Whitesheaf.

• Association of American Colleges and Universities. 2009. “Teamwork VALUE Rubric.” https://www.aacu.org/initiatives/value-initiative/value-rubrics/value-rubrics-teamwork

• Bacon, Donald R. “The Effects of Group Projects on Content-Related Learning.” Journal of Management Education 29 no. 2 (April 2005): 248-267.

• Pink, Daniel. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead, 2009.

The “Intellectual Discovery” courses (first-year seminars) in HPU-Lead include the teamwork objective: “Inter- and Intrapersonal Skills #2 - Foster a constructive team climate through polite communication, a positive and confident attitude, and helpfulness.” This speaks primarily to the “Fosters Constructive Team Climate” outcome of the AAC&U Teamwork VALUE Rubric, but also overlaps with “Contributes to Team Meetings,” and “Facilitates the Contributions of Team Members.” To address this in DIS 1000 Music, Resilience, and Life Skills, I devote the first three weeks after the mid-semester break to a series of competitive group projects. My “Group Work Procedure” is available via the link to the left.

At the beginning of the process, my goal is to create several identifiers that can be used to make group identity salient., including a Scottish tartan (a nod to North Carolina’s history), a theme song, and a callback. Groups sit together for the unit and are expected to stand upon hearing their theme song, and to respond immediately to their callback (or else they are fined, see below), and in so doing, they are reminded of their membership in the group.

Since competition enhances group identification, I use immediately identifiable images from Monopoly to signal a game-like atmosphere. Everything in the unit is worth Monopoly money: class participation is rewarded on the spot with $1 bills, outstanding projects get a bonus (usually $20, but this seems to be too much), and fines are collected for forgetting to stand for the theme song, and so forth. The room is divided into tax value districts (named and valued according to Monopoly color groups), and students are assigned seating weekly to the district corresponding to their net worth.

Each of the three projects include both individual and group components, which are graded independently, so that individual group members will not suffer unduly from social loafers. The teamwork itself is self and peer-assessed according to the Teamwork VALUE Rubric via Microsoft forms. Students also evaluate each other by (hypothetically) dividing up the group’s money according to the level of their contribution. At the end of the unit, a bonus is awarded to the winning group, and students complete an overall teamwork assessment in the unit reflection.

I prototyped this model in Fall 23 and Spring 24, and while promising, it need further refinement. I need to be more consistent with the theme songs, etc. so that the groups cohere more quickly and they could probably benefit from class time allocated for work. In Spring 24, the winning group had amassed $61, but the lowest-performing groups had only $7 and $8—I suspect that as the gap between group assets became wider, the lower-performing groups simply gave up. I plan to revisit Dan Pink’s Drive to assess where I’m going wrong with incentives.

“Conflict resolution” is also a persistent problem. While this objective is addressed in a separate HPU-Lead course, we do have problems in DIS 1000, and they are exacerbated by both the mental health of the students (no amount of incentive or punishment will affect a student paralyzed with anxiety), and the unit’s placement in weeks 9-11, when student motivation and energy are typically at their lowest. I continue to meditate on this.