Introduction

Welcome to Working with Student Teams, a short online module designed to help you work more efficiently with student teams within your classes. This module is designed to help you work with teams in both face-to-face and online courses. Regardless of what type of course you teach, you should find helpful information within this course regarding the formation, facilitation and performance of student teams.

The simplest way to navigate through this course is to use the links to the right side of the page.

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

  • Describe specific criteria that will help you decide whether an assignment should be completed in a team or individually.
  • Identify various team configurations and methods for creating teams.
  • Identify and describe the four stages of team development.
  • Identify different methods of assessing team assignments.

This course is designed to help you create a team assignment for your class as you work through the lessons. We are happy to provide feedback should you choose to follow the ACTIVITY recommendations throughout this module. Some activities ask that you post responses to questions at the bottom of certain pages, while other activities involve emailing Larkin Hood (lnh2@psu.edu) specific documents. We are happy to provide a Certificate of Completion for your records should you fulfill all the ACTIVITY sections of the course.


About the Author

Bart PurselDr. Bart Pursel is the Faculty Programs Coordinator for Education Technology Services and Affiliate Faculty Member in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. Bart was a Research Associate with the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence during the design and development of this module. Dr. Pursel worked in faculty development for several years at Penn State while with the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence. His Dissertation focused on teams, specifically the challenges of working in virtual teams.