Suggestions for student teamwork

Here are a few things you can do to increase the chance of success in teamwork:

1. Raise awareness of potential issues in teamwork

Student teamwork faces several challenges:

  • Students manage work from several courses simultaneously (on top of other personal commitments).
  • Some students may be more motivated to work on a particular project than others.
  • There was no established communication and collaboration infrastructure.
  • Different students may have different working styles, and the self-perception of their own contribution might differ from their peers’ perception.

Consider reading this short essay about how some members may slack and discuss with your team.

2. Start by setting up the necessary processes and infrastructure:

  • What level of quality do your team aim to achieve with this work
  • How will you communicate? When do you expect the team to monitor and respond (and when not)?
  • Where will you work together? Both physical location (e.g., where to meet in person) and virtual location (e.g., a shared folder)
  • Who will coordinate the team?
  • When will you work on the project (and when not)? Each team member should take into account their other commitments.

3. A coordinator is necessary

At each moment of the project, there should be one person who spends around 30% of the time on the project planning and coordinating team members. This person should know the overall status of each part of the work in the project and is responsible for communicating and pushing the project forward.

If a team member is absent from communication for more than a week, the issue is reported to the coaches together with the traces of communication (e.g., email that was sent or screenshots of chat messages with the date)

4. Meet effectively

  1. Before each meeting, write a list of goals that are aimed to be achieved in the meeting. This is the agenda.
  2. Consider which participants are necessary to discuss each point. Not everyone has to be present in all meetings all the time.
  3. Have a dedicated person to take notes for each meeting. Team members take turns to be the note-taker. When the note-taker speaks, another member should help take notes.
  4. Note-taker summarizes the points that were discussed, decisions that were made, and questions that remain. No need to transcribe the meeting verbatim.
  5. At the end of each meeting, there should be a clear task assignment: who should do what, by when, what is the scope, and what are the criteria for accomplishment.
  6. In follow-up meetings, revisit the assigned tasks and update their status. When necessary, revise the scope and the deadline of the tasks that are carried over.

Meeting notes serve several purposes:

  • During the meeting, the notes represent the common understanding among the participants.
  • After the meeting, the notes help the participants recall the points discussed.
  • Before subsequent meetings, a quick read of the notes from the previous meeting and the agenda of the upcoming meeting lets the participants mentally activate relevant information and physically prepare relevant materials in anticipation of the upcoming discussion.

To best serve these purposes, we recommend the following:

  1. Create a shared document with the newest meeting at the top (reverse chronological order).
  2. In each entry, list who was present at the meeting and the date and time of the meeting.
  3. During the meeting, ensure that all participants can see what is written in the notes in real time. If there are ambiguities or misunderstandings, they can be immediately corrected.