Designing Longer-Term Team Projects

Successful team projects can be intellectually challenging and rewarding for you and your students. They provide students with the autonomy to dive deeper into topics they’re interested in and engage in the authentic work of the field. Working as part of a team can be especially productive for students when they feel a connection with each other and a sense of shared purpose. The most successful teams recognize that they will perform better personally and as a group by working together.

For students, a team-based approach has the additional benefits of:

Facilitating new insights.
Stimulating creativity.
Developing higher-level reasoning strategies.
Deepening overall learning.
Allowing for more challenging tasks.
Fostering feelings of connection and belonging (building community).
Improving communication and teamwork skills.
Increasing motivation.

In the following sections, we discuss recommendations for:

Selecting team-appropriate projects.
Structuring team projects.
Involving your teaching assistants with team projects.
Determining group size for team projects.
Assigning students to project teams.

Selecting Team—Appropriate Projects

As you begin to develop your ideas for a project assignment, consider some of the characteristics that make a project well-suited for teams.

Team-appropriate projects:

Support student learning outcomes.
Have clear goals, deliverables, or a focus on a defined question or challenge.
Are of moderate complexity that allow for a variety of student roles and responsibilities.
Are personally meaningful or relevant to students.
Are authentic in that they allow students to practice discipline-based skills or investigate and address issues in the field.
Require the work of all team members for success and cannot easily be completed by just one person.

Team-appropriate projects can take many forms. Some instructors assign a specific project format that each team must complete, while others offer their students a choice of formats for their project (e.g., written, oral, visual design, etc.). Offering a choice, even if limited, allows students to demonstrate their learning in a format that aligns with their strengths. However, in some cases, the format is essential to the learning outcomes (e.g., a public speaking class will likely require an oral format).

Some examples of team-appropriate projects include:

Research studies or experiments.
Video presentations or podcasts.
Designs or prototypes.
Exhibits or collections.
Posters, infographics, or zines.
Performances, choreography, or musical compositions.
Computer programming, data visualization, or database design projects.
Websites.
Community-engaged projects or events.
Business models or grant proposals.
Policy or case analysis.

If a semester or half-semester-long project seems like too much for your course, it might make sense to assign your students one or two shorter projects. Sometimes, a shorter project early in the semester can help acclimate your students to working in teams, while practicing the skills they’ll need to complete their longer-term project.

Structuring Team Projects

As you plan your assignment, there are a number of actions you can take to ensure your project is structured and to help avoid common pitfalls of team projects.

We recommend:

Setting Clear Expectations

Be transparent about what your students are being asked to do and how they will be assessed.

For example, you may want to:

Create a rubric that outlines your criteria and describes the levels of performance students will be graded on and how that relates to the grades they earn. If you will also be grading students on the teamwork process, consider a second rubric for evaluating team functioning.
Include a project timeline with milestones or target dates for components, or outline the steps for the project and/or project components.
Provide examples, either ones publicly available (e.g., a website, podcast, infographic), or previous examples of student work – provided the students give you permission to share it. If you teach this class repeatedly, you can start a collection of examples and ask students for their permission to share their work with subsequent classes.

Breaking the Project into Smaller (Graded) Parts

To help students stay on track, break the project into parts and grade at milestones (e.g., project plan, first draft, final draft) rather than assigning the full grade to the final product. Structuring the project this way allows you to identify teams who are struggling early on, when additional guidance may help them get back on track.

With more complex and innovative projects, sometimes the final product does not turn out as expected; grading at several milestones means that students can receive credit for their effort and progress along the way.

Putting Supports in Place for Feedback

It’s important to provide feedback at or prior to project milestones, and at other points along the way.

Check in with students. In small to medium classes, we recommend meeting with student groups at least once. In large classes, teaching assistants might oversee student groups.
Consider incorporating peer feedback, in which groups review each other’s proposals or drafts using a rubric. This can be done in class or through online peer-review tools such as FeedbackFruits, Canvas Peer Review, or Turnitin, which can all be accessed through Canvas.

Reserving Time for Project Work During Class Time

Consider setting aside three or more classes for project work. Not only does this give teams additional time to work when all members are available, but it also allows for immediate feedback and discussion with you or your teaching team.
Being present while teams work enables you to monitor their functioning and progress.

Structuring Team Member Participation

Students must understand their roles and responsibilities within the team in order to contribute fully. You can support this by:

Requiring teams to assign roles and clearly delineate each member’s responsibilities, to demonstrate understanding.
Consider asking students to submit this information as part of an assignment.
See Preparing Students to Work Together.

Choosing a Communication Medium or Team Members and Teaching Staff

Online collaborative tools such as Canvas Groups can help organize communications.
Students may also define their own preferred mode of communication as part of their team contract.

Providing Opportunities for Reflection

Use assignments that ask students to reflect on their work and the work of their team, to learn from their experiences.
Students can gain valuable practice with feedback and strengthen their teams when they use their individual reflections as the basis for a discussion about team functioning (e.g., reflecting on strengths, quality of interactions, areas for improvement).

Involving Your Teaching Assistants with Team Projects

The idea of implementing team projects may feel overwhelming initially (especially in a large class), but if you can involve teaching assistants in the process, the responsibility for overseeing the projects won’t fall solely on you.

Here are a few things that you can do to help bring your teaching assistants into the process.

Be clear about their roles and your expectations.
Share how their experiences might benefit them in their future careers (e.g., activity design, team formation, mentoring, etc.).
Ask about their concerns. What has their experience been with team projects?
Involve them early in the planning. Teaching assistants may have prior experience with group projects or ideas to share that are valuable to the process. What are their ideas for making this a positive experience for students (and for themselves)?
Offer a choice of roles. Is there a part of the process that they are particularly interested in or would find meaningful? (e.g., brainstorming project ideas, “matchmaking” teams based on student skills or interests, mentoring teams, or monitoring discussion boards or other forums for student communication).

Determining Group Size for Team Projects

Consider your learning objectives and the types of projects your students will undertake. Some projects are best suited for pair work, while others might benefit from additional team members. There are pros and cons to various team sizes.

Groups of 2:

Dividing students into pairs gives students equal ownership, simplifies scheduling, and makes it easier for quieter students to speak up.
However, the small group size can make it difficult if a partner drops the class or becomes ill.

Groups of 3–5:

Tend to work well because there are enough members for rich conversations with multiple perspectives. With their range of skills and interests, these groups may support more complex assignments. And because of their size, they can more easily adapt when a student joins or drops the course.

Groups Larger Than 5:

Can be difficult to manage. Coordinating schedules is more of a challenge, and there is a likelihood that some students will put in less effort. We don’t usually recommend groups of this size, unless the project can be broken into smaller components with sub-groups.

Assigning Students to Project Teams

The method you choose to assign students into groups will depend on your goals for the project. You can help facilitate inclusive teams where students feel welcome, seen, and heard by paying attention to team composition and by preparing students to work together.

Keep in mind that students may have conflicting schedules that make it difficult for them to meet outside of class. Surveying your students about their availability ahead of time and making adjustments to teams will help prevent problems later on.

Here are a few options for assigning groups into teams:

Random Assignment

Randomly assigned teams are the most straightforward to set up and require the least time investment from you. They work especially well when teams are reassigned multiple times throughout the semester.

Considerations:

You may need to make adjustments to teams based on the results of your student availability survey.
Other small adjustments to the random groupings may be helpful to best support student needs, account for class dynamics, or balance groups in terms of experiences, background, or skills.

Teams based on interests, skills, schedule availability, or working preferences

Depending on your goals for the project, you might consider forming teams based on student interest, skills, availability, or working style. There are benefits to each of the methods and you can include any number of these in your team formation process.

Options:

Group students by interest to allow them to work on topics they care about.
Create heterogeneous teams to utilize diverse skills and experiences, especially when a range of talents is needed.
Assign teams based on availability to reduce challenges in arranging meeting times.
Match students by working preferences (e.g., early bird vs. night owl, last-minute sprinter vs. slow-and-steady) to help prevent team conflict.
Use a survey to gather relevant data for team formation.
Consider using team-making software to assign students based on your criteria if your class is large (e.g., Canvas Groups or GroupEng which are both FERPA compliant).

Consideration:

This method requires a greater time investment by the instructor.

Student-Formed Teams

Students often tend to prefer to choose their own teams, and self-selection can work well for some. However, it’s important that you be aware of the potential downside for others.

The main benefit is that students get to work on a topic they’re interested in with people they may already know and are comfortable with.
The downside is that it is:
- Potentially less effective. It’s easier for students who are friends to get off track in their discussions. Also, groups of friends might be more willing to allow free-riders.
- May leave weaker students on their own if stronger students group together (Oakley, 2004).
- May be challenging for students to negotiate finding a group if they are not already well-connected socially in the class.