Theres no I in team: Supporting and evidencing individual development within teamwork activities Jodie Young, PebblePad & Priscilla Trahar,
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The development of effective teamwork capabilities is a crucial employability skill that also fosters active learning through the construction of knowledge and the enhancement of problembased learning. Being able to surface and provide feedback on this learning is a key concern for educators. Among the noted disadvantages of assessed group work are the potential for motivational issues and concerns of fairly assessing individual participation and contribution. As part of the University of the Sunshine Coast’s institution-wide first-year communication skills course, students engage in a team project culminating in a group presentation. The use of reflective tasks and self- and peer-evaluations within a PebblePad Workbook has provided a reflective space and supportive framework which allows for the development and recognition of individual achievement within the group work task. This presentation will demonstrate some of the resources designed to support these processes.
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Theres no I in team: Supporting and evidencing individual development within teamwork activities Jodie Young, PebblePad & Priscilla Trahar,
- 1. There’s no I in Team: Supporting & evidencing individual development within teamwork activities Jodie Young Priscilla Trahar PebblePad University of the Sunshine Coast
- 2. Context I don’t know what image to use yet!
- 3. “Roman Presentation Rom Com Presentation” by djromanj is licensed under CC BY 2.0
- 4. “Evaluation Scale” by billsoPHOTO is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
- 5. “reflections” by Hege is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
- 6. Free rides by Matt DeTurck is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
- 7. The revenge of the sucker by clement127 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
- 8. Stand Out from The Crowd Unique Golf Tee Game by Stephen Depolo is licensed under CC BY 2.0
- 9. “Students in Class” by Wayne MacPhail is licensed under CC BY -NC -SA 2.0
- 13. “Private” by Ben O”Bryan is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
- 15. “positive connections” by T-Bone Sandwich is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
- 18. “Make it make sense” by Ed Mitchell is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
- 20. “Engagement” by karinli is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
- 22. Acknowledgement: Workbook designed by Priscilla Trahar, Learning Designer (ePortfolios) Centre for the Support and Advancement of Learning and Teaching (C~SALT) University of the Sunshine Coast
Editor's Notes
- Our scenario is a compulsory communication skills subject for 1st year undergraduates at the University of the Sunshine Coast. There are around 2 and a half thousand students enrolled, and about 50 academics involved in the teaching and assessment. USC believe it to be the largest undergraduate course in Australia.
- As part of this subject, students must engage in group work and learn about team development. Assessment involves a group presentation, as well as reflective exercises and self & peer evaluations. In the past, the group presentation has been the major focus of student energy and effort.
- A major challenge was managing the reflective and evaluative component of the course. The students tended to only pay lip service to evaluation, especially of their peers. It was common practice for students to sit together and rate each other highly in their final group meeting. This ‘tick’n’flick’ approach clearly needed to be turned around.
- The vision was to find a way to surface the learning that was happening within the group activities, and promote deeper reflective practices. If the final evaluations could be tied to regular reflective activities, which themselves were linked to both the theory and practice of teamwork, the outcomes were far more likely to be authentic and meaningful.
- An additional concern about assessing group work is ensuring that the contributions by individual group members are able to be acknowledged and to identify any free-riding behaviour. The effect of free-riding on other students can make group work an unpleasant experience for some.
- This can also lead to the “sucker effect”, whereby competent students who feel that other group members may be taking advantage of them by free-riding, don’t want to feel like ‘suckers’, and so reduce their own input into the task. Research has shown that in some cases students will even choose to fail as a group rather than be a ‘‘sucker’’.
- Recognition of individual effort and the ability to let team members stand out from the crowd is crucial in reducing the instances of free-riding and ensuring fair assessment. However, this needs to be achieved in a way that doesn’t lead to individuals trying to outshine or upstage the rest of the team during the group presentation.
- Successful teamwork is more than just being able to ‘get together and get along’. It requires skills to step back and reflect on what is happening within the group. So students need a space in which they can do that and they also need a guiding framework to support them in developing their reflective skills.
- The solution was to create an interactive online workbook using PebblePad, to be used in conjunction with tutorial activities. The workbook is essentially a Task-portfolio which is both product and process-focussed, and aims to support the construction of personal meaning and relevance through the learning activities.
- The PebblePad workbook provides a framework for learning. Students enrich and enhance the workbook by adding their responses and reflections, contributing to a deeper learning experience. They emerge from this experience with a rich record of not just the content, but the processes of learning and a record of their own development, which can then be used as evidence in any context they choose.
- So, what’s in the workbook? The learning content supplements and extends the work covered in lectures. Students are prompted to reflect on how the communication theories & examples they are presented with match with their own experiences. So in this example they watch a video about public speaking and answer questions which lead onto reflecting about their own thoughts and skills.
- The workbook is accessed through Pebble+, the student Personal Learning Space. This space is student-owned and controlled, and they choose when and with whom to share their content. In addition to the workbook, which must be submitted, students can access a range of resources within Pebble+, like reflective templates and a blog tool, to engage in personal reflections which can remain entirely private.
- Once the workbook has been submitted, a live link is created between the student workbook and assessment space, so the tutor can monitor student progress in real time and offer formative feedback. Timely and personalised feedback is a highly effective means of supporting these first year students through the challenges of teamwork and public speaking.
- The reflective processes that form the basis of the workbook encourage active learning, problem solving, making connections and building contexts. Positive social connectedness is encouraged through effective feedback dialogue The weekly tasks encourage connections about the learning that is taking place and its relevance and meaning to the learner’s life and goals.
- An additional way of encouraging students to make connections is by making explicit the university Graduate Attributes. Initially, this was not formally included in the coursework. Tutors saw an ideal opportunity within the workbook structure to encourage students to engage with the Graduate Attributes by rating their development.
- The workbook is not a discrete piece of assessment, but covers the span of the topic, so that each week students are touching on all of the aspects of how the group work tasks and activities reflect their development of Graduate Attributes. Timely and supportive feedback from tutors scaffolds the process and encourages developmental progression.
- Under this model, learning is deeper and facilitates self-development of higher order thinking skills and transferrable competencies. Learners come away with a good sense of their own development & transferability of their skills. PebblePad has built in some very powerful tools to enable the academics to also keep track and make sense of the learning that is occurring across the cohort.
- Reporting allows tutors to gain a clear overview of student responses. Features like self-ratings can be presented graphically to easily track and compare the student responses over the weeks of the unit. An added advantage to the easy compilation of such data is its implications for supporting research.
- Reports also allow tutors to keep track of student engagement. From this report we can get an overview of responses by individual student, which allows students who seem to be having difficulty or aren’t responding to questions to be flagged and supported. Reports can also be run showing students who haven’t yet submitted so they can be sent a reminder through the system.
- By the time students come to the the end of the unit they have a valuable resource to assist them with final reflections and self- and peer evaluations. These tasks are more meaningful in light of the previous reflective tasks. They can easily review their own skills development from the beginning of the task, and be able to consider more carefully the participation of fellow group members. The result is a transparent and effective process for evidencing – and acknowledgement of – individual achievement within a team.