Group Projects 101 - Getting Started
This is the landing page of group projects for teachers. This is test material.
How can I take student groups from different fields and majors into account?
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Test text: Having your students work together with people from different fields is extremely valuable in terms of learning and gaining critical working life skills. However, such teams do come with certain challenges that are important to recognize and manage. The following discussion and recommendations are based on a thorough article on unlocking the potential in interdisciplinary teams by Dr. Satu Rekonen, a lecturer at Aalto School of Science.
The key benefit in teams with members from different fields stems from the fact that there is a broader variety of knowledge, skills and viewpoints available. This in turn can lead to higher levels of novelty and creativity in team outputs. However, it is precisely the same characteristics that make collaboration between people from different fields more complex. While individual level variance of course exists, on a general level each field has their own working culture and values, language and terminology as well as working styles. Such variance within teams can be a source of friction, frustration and misunderstandings.
Test text: Having your students work together with people from different fields is extremely valuable in terms of learning and gaining critical working life skills. However, such teams do come with certain challenges that are important to recognize and manage. The following discussion and recommendations are based on a thorough article on unlocking the potential in interdisciplinary teams by Dr. Satu Rekonen, a lecturer at Aalto School of Science.
The key benefit in teams with members from different fields stems from the fact that there is a broader variety of knowledge, skills and viewpoints available. This in turn can lead to higher levels of novelty and creativity in team outputs. However, it is precisely the same characteristics that make collaboration between people from different fields more complex. While individual level variance of course exists, on a general level each field has their own working culture and values, language and terminology as well as working styles. Such variance within teams can be a source of friction, frustration and misunderstandings.
TEST: Having your students work together with people from different fields is extremely valuable in terms of learning and gaining critical working life skills. However, such teams do come with certain challenges that are important to recognize and manage. The following discussion and recommendations are based on a thorough article on unlocking the potential in interdisciplinary teams by Dr. Satu Rekonen, a lecturer at Aalto School of Science.
- Spending time together in the beginning of the project is particularly critical for teams with members from different fields. By getting to know each team members, their skills, knowledge and interests, the better they can utilize each others experise throughout the project. It also helps in finding meaningful roles for everybody – a key way to combat freeriding. Further, getting to know everybody in the team early on helps create mutual trust and sense of fellowship, also a key ingredient in good team culture.
- Developing good working practices is important for any team. However, it is particularly important for teams with members from different fields as each field might have a bit different conventions in terms of work practices. Similar to getting to know your team mates, spending time to define working principles is smart to do right at the beginning of the project. However, it is important that team reflects along the way whether their working practices are meaningful and as intended. Both in the beginning and along the journey, teams are likely to need support, because people tend to focus on just doing project-related tasks rather than reflecting on their work and collaboration in general.
- In a good team, people give both positive feedback and constructive criticism to each other. Positive feedback makes us more confident about our skills, aware of our contributions to the team and more willing to share our ideas. Meaningful, constructive criticism ensures that issues or misunderstandings are addressed and that frustration doesn’t build up. As there is an increased risk of creative friction when team members are from different fields, fostering feedback-giving is particularly critical.
- As a teacher, the most valuable thing you can do is provide time and structure for your teams for getting to know each other, planning and reflecting of work practices and getting peer feedback.
- All courses: Reserve time from your first lectures for team building exercises and ask your students to discuss and define how they intend to collaborate together. This does not necessarily require a large project plan, a simple team agreement can be enough. More information: “What are good first team building exercises?”
- Longer, more intensive projects: Recommend your teams to have more informal get-togethers like having a team lunch/dinner. Provide clear justifications for this by for example arguing that knowing your teammates tends to make teams more effective and working more fun.
- All courses: Consider integrating into your course some sort of peer feedback or reflection exercise where team members have the possibility to evaluate their teamwork-related strengths and weaknesses. In an optimal way, this reflection includes both individual and collective level examination, like for example I like I wish -method (LINK). However, more simplified methods that focus only on collective level such as KPT (LINK) can also be very beneficial, if there is less time or facitiliation resources available.
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