Week 4 Mini Session Overview and Back Pocket Strategies

Week 4 Mini Session Overview

This week we will be led by our colleagues through a real-life inspired case about working in teams!

• Case: Team in Trouble (Class forum)

If you are NOT listed as one of the facilitators for the activities this week (see the course schedule), then you are a "student" in that activity and will be getting direction from the facilitators on how to proceed.

Since we don't yet know what tools or processes the facilitators will use to support our learning, the best thing you can do to prepare is...

1. read the case: Team in Trouble - it is very short and presented mostly as email exchanges among this fictional team.
2. review the Unit Notes and videos for this unit
3. read the readings for this unit

As always, toward the end of the week, "students" will give facilitators feedback on how they did in the Mini-session Feedback Forum. So have a good look at the learning outcomes for this unit and prepare to give feedback on how their facilitation did/not support your achieving those outcomes. And if not, what would have helped you?

Team in Trouble Back Pocket Strategy

Goals of this activity:

This week’s discussions on facilitating online teamwork might leave you feeling the need for two pockets! There are a few things going on here that, as facilitator, you want to stay on top of:

1. helping your students unpack the 'Team in Trouble' case and use it as a springboard for as much rich discussion and learning as possible
2. managing timelines – both a process of discussion AND a process of collaborative writing need to take place.
3. notice, reflect upon, and discuss your own team dynamic.

Here are the Learning Outcomes and Assessment Criteria you should be working with/toward for this activity

Unpacking the Case: this kind of discussion is about finding ways to help your learners to unpack a real-life case. Case-based learning and discussions are very common at Royal Roads and in higher education, in general, so this is a great opportunity to explore ways to structure digging into cases beyond telling learners to simply “read and discuss”. Ultimately, we want to:

1. explore critical issues raised by this case – there are some obvious and not so obvious ones.
2. generating strategies for how to address the issues (and implications for choices/actions)

To get at these things directly, you might pose questions along these lines:

• based on the information provided, what do you think is going on here? What do you feel are the critical issues at play? Are there any subtle (almost hidden) issues that might be overlooked?
• as the course instructor, what steps would you take to effectively manage these issues?
• can you think of a way to get there less “obviously”, but still directly?

Timelines & moving your participants along: there is a summary due, at the end of this activity, to be posted to the class so sharing can occur across teams. Again, this is a common way to structure online discussions at RRU – small team discussions followed by summaries posted to the whole class (the online equivalent to what we often do with large f2f classes). How can you help your learners get there in a timely way?

Sometimes students are assigned roles for collaborative work like this - can you think of roles or “hats” students can wear that would advance the quality of their discussion and work here?

Your own team dynamic

Yet another learning opportunity is to explore how your team functioned in this discussion. Was it effective? Consider using the following questions as prompts and discussion starters:

• how does your experience as a group relate to Tuckman’s Five Stages (forming, storming, norming, performing...)?
• how did you work effectively as a team to work on this assignment?
• what lessons learned about facilitating team learning came out of this assignment for you?

Another idea: make it personal

It may be interesting and worthwhile to invite your learners to share their own stories about team dynamics. Inviting personal reflection and storytelling can stimulate participation, engagement, and make the learning seem highly relevant. It can also extend the time needed to support the activity. If you go this route, we suggest:

• start a new thread for this kind of sharing
• think about sequencing – when to invite sharing?
• watch your time: be careful the discussion doesn’t wander too far away from the task at hand. One way to go about this is to provide timelines and structure. For example, rather than saying, “does anyone else have a horror story to share?”, you could ask learners to think about a time they experienced or heard about a conflict similar to the one described in the case, and share : 1) how that case was framed/understood by the people involved, 2) what was done about it (strategy used), and 3) what happened next (i.e., was it a good strategy in the end?).
• Roles / Rights and Responsbilities contract example attached

Group Member Bill of Rights Example

Group Member Bill of Rights and Responsibilities
 Participants have the right and responsibility to select meeting times and locations that are convenient for all members.
 Participants have the right to contribute to the formation of group goals, the dividing of the work among group members, and the setting of deadlines.
 Participants have the right to expect all group members to do their fair share of the work and participants have the right to confront group members who are not doing their fair share in a respectful and professional manner.
 Participants have the responsibility to complete the work assigned.
 Participants have the responsibility to be an active participant in the group process. And participants have the right to expect active participation from other group members.
 Participants have the right to expect feedback from the group on work participants complete for the group and participants have the responsibility to provide constructive feedback on the work of other group members.
 Participants have the right to expect group meetings to begin and end promptly and that the group will follow an agenda that outlines the tasks it expects to accomplish during the meeting. Participants have the responsibility to help the group fulfill these expectations by getting to meetings on time and helping the group develop and follow the agenda.
 Participants have the right to participate in a group that works cooperatively and handles disagreements constructively.
 Participants have the right to ask group members to limit the amount of time devoted to socialization or the discussion of extraneous topics. Participants have the responsibility not to engage in excessive socialization or to bring up extraneous topics. Participants have the responsibility to help the group stay on task.
 Participants have the right to expect that group members will listen to participants respectfully and participants have the responsibility to listen to all group members respectfully.
Adapted from a study group bill of rights developed by D. G. Longman and published in The Teaching Professor, 1992, 6 (7), 5.
 Students have the right to be aware of and protect their own grades, even if that means doing a project by oneself.
 Group members have the right not to "wait" or be "held hostage" by an absent member. No matter what, the group work must move forward on schedule.
 The instructor / facilitator has the responsibility to monitor groups and ensure lost members are found and have a plan in place.
 Groups have the responsibility to keep the absent member in the communication loop, but not to wait for him/her to show up. The students who "show up" have the right to control the project.