Ask a group of undergraduate students about their experiences of teamwork, and most – if not all – of the responses you hear will be negative: ‘Person X was a freeloader’, ‘Person Y is lazy’, ‘I’m aiming for a First, but everyone else is happy with a 2.1’ – just some of the common complaints. And feedback from teaching staff can be equally unfavourable, with colleagues often reporting that they spend too long dealing with issues in groups, and less time than they would like focused on supporting students with the disciplinary content of their group project. In short, student teamwork can be painful for both educators and learners.

But here’s the thing. Teamwork too often becomes a negative experience because we work on an assumption that students will learn teamworking skills simply by working in a team. We expect experiential learning to take place, but fail to scaffold it sufficiently – either because of a focus on the goal and disciplinary content, or because of a lack of awareness of how best to support team development.

This situation leads to a typical pattern in the life-cycle of student teams. First, the project is set, new teams are formed, and there is a general level of excitement; students see possibilities and imagine what they will achieve. This part of the process is usually well-supported, because it frequently happens in class, with some planning time after introduction of the project brief. Next, individuals’ interests, commitment and motivations become clearer, and frustrations emerge as students decide that some members of the group are less committed than others, or have different grade aspirations. Perhaps there’s one member of the team that never shows up, and everyone decides, on the basis of lack of being present alone, that he or she is lazy. Students may attempt to resolve these frustrations by appealing to teaching staff for help, but more often than not, students who see themselves as committed and hard-working resign themselves to this situation being normal for teamwork; some team members then contribute more than their share, working hard even if complaining to each other, in order to get the task done to the standard they have determined is acceptable. Students accept that this is the way of things; that their success may result in inflated and undeserved success for others, but that is the price to be paid for their personal positive outcome. That said, if peer marking opportunities are available, they will attempt to seek fairer outcomes by downgrading peers judged not to have contributed equally, with peer marking therefore representing a measure of effort, not quality of contributions.

Little wonder, then, that students report that they do not like working in teams, and suggest that they prefer individual assignments. In the terms of Tuckman’s widely-cited model of team development (1965), problems arise in the storming and norming stages, which lead to hampered performance. Teams rarely become effective and fully functional, and so students’ view that teamworking is hard and not worth the effort are reinforced. And the bigger problem is that teamworking does not end on graduation: it is a crucial professional capability, essential for success in the workplace. Graduates need to be equipped to value and thrive through working in a team, where outputs and outcomes are stronger as a result of combining multiple ideas, perspectives and skillsets. 

Interestingly, students who have been on year in industry placements often perform much better in team scenarios when they return to studying. This is unsurprising, because of a crucial difference in their experience of teams in the workplace: they are working with other people who are experienced, more highly-skilled team members, who understand how to work professionally, how to work through different perspectives and ideas, build consensus, and avoid or navigate conflict. No-one teaches students how to work in teams in this workplace context, but they learn a lot. The environment, where learners are working alongside more experienced role models, with professional relationships, and an expectation of professional behaviour, is ripe for successful experiential learning.

Compare that context with our classrooms. We have students who are all equally inexperienced in teamworking, all similarly unskilled in navigating team dynamics and handling conflict, but we are expecting them to learn how to build a successful team. Without some external input, or more experienced team members, this learning is always going to be painful. It is experiential learning with no underpinning experience. It becomes a process of trial and error, of frustrating wrong turns, and ultimately, a distraction from achieving whatever project or output is required of the team. Outcomes are often lower grades for the output work, and little or no learning about how to manage working in a team effectively.

Student teamwork does not have to be this way, but the challenge for educators is to scaffold and support the learning journey of students – through approaches such as explicit training and support with teamworking; mentoring; or providing role models, especially where projects with students from different levels, and so varied experiences, are possible. It is time to shift the emphasis away from reactive fire-fighting in response to students protesting that members of their team are not performing, or complaints about grades being unfair. It is time to invest the time and energy that those things take into supporting students to have the capabilities to avoid the problems in the first place. Professional skills, outside a workplace context, need effective teaching and coaching. Without it, learning by doing can only ever be learning through frustration.

Look out for a future post sharing approaches to supporting students working in teams to build their teamworking skills.

Tuckman, B.W. (1965). Developmental Sequence in Small Groups. Psychological Bulletin. 63(6), 384–399.