I wasn’t familiar with Tuckman’s stages of team development prior to this week’s lesson, but I’ve seen it in practise more times than I can count. Team-building in education is crucial and occurs on multiple levels: within each classroom/grade level, among teachers and other staff, admin and the front office, and more. Nowhere is this more visible than in special education, where a classroom’s teacher and staff rely on each other to ensure our students’ safety and well-being.

When I began teaching special education, my first classroom was for multiple disabilities, a very medically-intensive classroom that wasn’t for the faint-of-stomach. Not only was I new to the classroom and the school, but so were my three aides, so none of us were familiar with the environment or the students before the school year started. Because I knew we’d have to be a cohesive unit if we were going to make a classroom like that work, I used the week before school begins, a teacher and staff work week, to setting up the room to work for our needs and focus on building a team. This was the getting-to-know-you phase when everyone’s on their best behaviour and with the best of intentions, which matches with Tuckman’s forming stage. (Gruman et al, 2016)

By two weeks in, tensions were starting to rise due to personality clashes, which led to passive-aggressive power struggles, competition between my aides, and pushback when changes were made in how the room was run, even over small ones like switching where the students’ daily folders were kept. Having so many service providers coming in and out of the room and often disrupting our routine certainly didn’t help, especially as they weren’t the most receptive to feedback when this was addressed. I felt like I was playing referee most days and when I’d come home exhausted, I wasn’t sure if it was more from the physical demands of the job or the stress of constantly defusing tension. It was Tuckman’s storming stage and it was a nightmare. (Gruman et al, 2016)

Fortunately, my mum has two decades of experience as an office manager, so when I went to her for advice because I was tearing my hair out, she gave me a veritable goldmine. First, on the first Monday after that talk, I added ‘Mrs F’s joke of the day’ to the morning announcements and I’d deliberately switch between good ones and the worst ones I could find to keep them on their toes, which turned into a guessing game for both staff and students. That same week, I asked my aides to pick an afternoon in two weeks’ time when they were all free to stay a little late so that we could have a group hang-out/check-in with snacks. Then a week before the meeting, I e-mailed them an anonymous Google Form where they could bring up any concerns or other issues they had, along with a yes/no option to have me bring up the concern at the meeting. When the meeting came, I knew tensions were going to be high, so when they came back to the classroom after getting our students out to their buses/cars, it was to me wearing a set of elephant ears and acting completely normal. It got the giggles I was hoping for and it turns out that it’s a lot harder for arguments to last longer than a minute when someone at the table has a set of funny ears. By the end of the meeting, we had talked through all the issues and then some, hammered out compromises, and left the meeting as a very different team. Those meetings became a monthly tradition where we’d fine-tune communication, find common ground, and re-commit to being the best team to take care of our students. Everyone also got their own set of funny ears. Thanks to my mum and her advice (okay, the elephant ears were my idea), I was able to create an intervention that got us into a healthy environment, right in line with Tuckman’s norming stage. (Gruman et al, 2016)

A classroom that intensive is never going to be a stress-free environment and minor conflicts were inevitable, but having collectively improved our communication skills and with a better understanding of each other’s thoughts and feelings, it became a lot easier to talk things out on the spot or at the next available opportunity rather than letting things fester and go back to a toxic environment. We noticed that the change in room energy affected our students as well, that they were more relaxed and generally more co-operative, which only served as motivation to reinforce the changes: those kids were the whole reason we were there, after all, so how could we not be committed to anything that made things better for them? Administration praised us, as did the students’ families, and we all grew as individuals. We started the year with barely the essentials and finished the year having turned the most medically-intensive classroom in the district into a well-oiled machine. When we reached Tuckman’s performing stage, we were truly at the top of our game. (Gruman et al, 2016)

Schools have a built-in adjourning stage as each year comes to an end and students prepare to move on, and it was no different for my class. Two students were graduating, two staff members (myself and one of my aides) were moving to other positions, and it meant a summer away from the classroom, one that would be spent missing our students. The last team hang-out was an emotional one, complete with an ‘official’ hand-over of the elephant ears as my gift to the next teacher who took the classroom, ‘most likely’ awards, and my parting gift to the group was copies of a book of recipes from the team meeting potlucks. (Gruman et al, 2016)

Special education is a small world and our district is an even smaller one, so crossing paths with my old teammates happens on a fairly regular basis: one now heads the autism department for our district, one has taught my younger daughter, my elder daughter’s new teacher is the person who trained me, and the list goes on. When you add the fact that schools share service providers and special education requires more frequent group trainings across schools, what it’s created is a district-wide special education team. My wife jokes that I can’t go to an IEP meeting for our daughters without defaulting to teacher-mode because I’m in the special education in-group; I’m one of the team.

Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (Eds.). (2016). Applied social psychology : Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. SAGE Publications, Incorporated.