A Letter to Professors

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It is likely you assign team projects in at least some of your classes.

 

In some, you are trying to develop your students’ teaming skills. In others, team projects are simply a means to learning concepts or analyzing cases. Sometimes, you provide structure and guidance to student teams. Sometimes you stay uninvolved, believing students should learn by trial and error in managing themselves. Some of you are expert in or teach classes involving team dynamics. Others have different areas of expertise and may not have the background or inclination to help manage student teams.

 

Whatever your situation, you probably have come to share my view that most student teams are not as effective as they can be, and a significant number of student teams end in disaster. This turns students off and prevents them from getting the most out of their projects. And, worst of all, our students are not developing the important team and team leadership skills they need as they entire the modern workforce.

 

We all want our students to succeed. That’s why my co-author, Dr. Steve Bear, and I wrote, We Hate Team Projects! A Friendly, Useful Guide for College Student Teams (Kendall Hunt, 2019), to help students and faculty more successfully navigate team projects. The book provides a quick review of key concepts of team dynamics, applying them to the specific situation of student project teams- topics such as: team formation, developing cohesiveness, crafting team ground rules, deciding on roles and structures, holding each other accountable, running effective meetings, providing peer feedback, and using simple project management tools. With our help, this will be the semester our students won’t hate their team projects!

 

Most importantly, this practical book contains multiple examples, assessments, and easy-to-use templates students can use to manage their team dynamics, and can help you more easily monitor team progress. 

 

Assigning this book as a secondary text (90 pages, $22 paperback, $15 as an ebook) should give you more confidence that your students will have a useful and friendly guide for the road ahead. It could be used in any course in any academic program that uses a team project for a good chunk of the learning in the class. You can use this book in a few ways:

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• If having students develop their knowledge and skills in teamwork is a learning objective for your course, I would assign teams most, if not all, of the readings and templates in this book.

• Instead, your priority may be that teams manage themselves well and you want to be kept up-to-date on team progress and/or problems. You can require the book, and have teams submit many of the templates to you as they track their progress.

• If you simply want teams to use the principles and templates of this book on their own, you can assign the book as an optional resource.

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