Four simple steps to running a successful team task

Hello, I’m Lauren Vicker, with my colleague Tim Franz. We’re faculty members from St. John Fisher University and the authors of Making Team Projects Work. We know that many faculty want to use, or maybe even improve, team projects in their classes, but they aren’t sure where to start. 

In this short video, we offer four easy steps to help make your team project a success. 

Some faculty members just take an individual project and assign it to a team. But that’s really not effective. Instead, it’s important to make sure that the tasks in the project are right for a team. To do this, make the goals of the project clear and compelling for your students. 

When you assign the project, make sure to show the grading rubric that you’re going to be using, so that students know your expectations. 

Make sure that any project requires that the students work together cooperatively. Don’t just assign a project that they can break up into pieces.

Then make sure to continuously check in with your students and even include some of those checkpoints in your grade.

You can develop effective team members by organising your teams using a deliberate and transparent process. Do not let students pick their own teams because you will end up with homogeneous groups that leave out or could maybe even ostracise some of your students. You may wish to assign specific roles, especially if you’re teaching online, but make sure students see how you’re putting the teams together and how you’re relying on their individual strengths. Then having each team create a team charter at the outset makes it more likely that students will work well together.

On the day you assign the team project, you can start your teams off on the right path by creating a positive environment. Help the teams to understand how this project fits into the goals and the context of the class and why this project is important to their learning and future careers. 

Begin the day with some icebreakers to help students get to know one another and the strengths they bring to that project. 

Also, make sure to let the teams know how you’ll be checking in during the project, whether it’s in person, via email, through surveys or even by attending some of the team meetings. As you’ve seen, we can’t stress enough the importance of checking in with your teams to be sure they’re progressing well. 

We’ve found it necessary to review the rubric from time to time. Many projects include peer evaluations, and we have a way to teach students how to give and receive feedback so they’ll know how to do this effectively. 

And while we know that our class time is precious, allowing some class time, even a few minutes at the end that normally might be wasted, will give you a better idea as to how well your teams are progressing. If you show examples from former successful projects, that can help them put together better papers, proposals, portfolios and/or presentations.

If you follow these simple steps, you’ll make it more likely that students will succeed, and it’ll be easier for you to evaluate their projects. You’ll give students a successful teamwork experience. And this is one of the top skills that employers are looking for in new hires. 

We know that we presented a lot of content here in this short video. So, feel free to reach out for more information at our email: MakingTeamProjectsWork@gmail.com. Check out our book or our website for more resources to make your team projects work better. I’m Tim Franz with Lauren Vicker. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you.

Lauren Vicker is an author, speaker and professor of communications emeritus, and Tim Franz is a professor of psychology, both at St. John Fisher University, US. They are co-authors of Making Team Projects Work: A College Instructor’s Guide to Successful Student Groupwork (Taylor & Francis, 2024).

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