Organising and Managing Teams

Biosystems Design 2023

When I first started to teach teamwork-based subjects the biggest complaints were about teamwork. In the first year, I attempted to assign students to their teams. As it turned out I had lots of complaints with students saying, ‘I would have done better If I got to choose my team’. The second time I ran the subject, I let them choose teams and I still had lots of complaints. Students said, ‘I found it hard to find a team as I didn’t know people in the class’, ‘Students organised themselves predominantly by ethnicity’, ‘All the best scorers formed their own team and I was left with poor team members, so I’m at a disadvantage’.

With all of this, it seemed like there was no way to win. I came up with a hybrid way to make teams. I’ve had fewer complaints on this since. This is a guide to setting up students in diverse teams, in a final year Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Biomedicine capstone subject. The subject is called Biosystems design and involves a project done in teams of 5.

Creating teams

The team creation is a three-step process: 1) Criterion setting – 2) Team allocation 3) Team reorganisation. To do this, I use a tool called CATME that was developed by PURDUE University. The UI isn’t great but you can’t fault its functionality and there is some research to back up the tool. Although there has been little work on this or improvement over the last 10 years. The web-based tool has two functions, Team-maker which is a criterion-based team formation tool and a peer evaluation tool where students rate each other’s performance generating a scaling factor that can be used to scale individual scores.

1) Criterion Setting In the CATME team maker tool instructors can choose from a broad set of criteria or set a custom criterion. This can include, Schedules (individual available time), work hour preferences (right/ day/weekends), Gender, Race/Ethnicity, grade, leadership prepence, commitment level, etc. It must be noted here that some of

• Some questions are personal, and not everyone wants to disclose them. If you choose gender, grade, etc., ensure you mention to the students how to answer if they prefer not to disclose. For example, for grade, I ask students to enter ‘O’ if they prefer not to disclose. Note: these responses are not shared with students in the tool but are only seen by the instructor.
• The schedule/availability/work preference is by far the most appreciated by students overall. Most students know their schedule before the start of the semester.
• Once you set up the criterion the students get 3-5 days to complete the survey and about 90-95% of the class finish the survey on time.

2) Team Allocation

Once every one or at least 90% of the students have submitted their response to the criteria selection we can make Teams. To do this CATME offers grouping weighting. It is a scale with a group dissimilar to a group similar with ignore in the middle.

In my grouping, I weigh the schedules the highest forcing CATME to group students with similar schedules. Since typical teams in a workplace have some diversity in Grade, gender, and ethnicity I ask for grouping dissimilar but with a lower weight. I give a stronger group dissimilar weighting for leadership preference and skill. This weighting means student schedules are respected, but diversity in teams which is unavoidable and absolutely necessary is considered. It is necessary that students are told about this before and the method of grouping is explained along with a clear explanation of why, and how it affects them in the subject and in the long term in their careers.

3) Team Reorganisation

Having allocated students into teams, and having explained the reasons and the benefits, I allow students to reorganise their teams. It is hard to predict if students will change groups and it varies year to year. However, when students choose to reorganise the group, they are asked to discuss, the survey questions and principles of good teams. They then wrote a short email about the charge, why it was necessary and how the new team has a diversity of skills required to complete the project work. The purpose of this is to ensure that students are thoughtful about their choices and are discussing them. Allowing students to reorganise is a small thing for us but it makes a big difference to the students to have the ability to choose and make changes. But in terms of final grades, there is no correlation between team performers and whether a team was allocated or chosen. Anecdotally some may argue for one or another but neither my experience and data from my subject nor the literature support this. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest it is how teams interact after formation that determines team success.

Managing Teams

Managing teams Often time we as academics think of our jobs as finished when the teams are created. While we would like this to be the case, the reality is teamwork like any other life skill is learnt. Our students are learning, they are watching you and me to see how we do it. They learn the importance of teamwork by seeing how much time we give to it. They learn conflict resolution by observing how we resolve conflicts. While we cannot make people behave as good team members we can give the students the framework for a good team, expectations and means to hold each other accountable.

• Means for accountability: Providing means for students to hold each other accountable is also important. CATME provides a peer assessment tool that helps students provide feedback within defined questions as well as the ability to provide comments to each other. It also provides options to provide the instructor with information on how the team is going so the instructor can act when teams may be struggling.

In conclusion, it must be said that teamwork is an essential skill for everyone and this is also true for engineering students. However, the appreciation of teamwork often gets left behind in the quest for scores. This is often the challenge that many instructors face. CATME goes a fair way to help provide a means for this to be done. But in the end, we need to keep modelling good teamwork and helping students see how it’s used in everyday life.

This is one of the teams demonstrating their project from 2023. The full play list can be seen here.