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Educator's Voice

Volume 3, Issue 10
October 23, 2002

Productive Teamwork: Remembering How To Work, A Personal Perspective

When my son was just five years old, I found him high in the branches of our backyard tree. He was pitching a real fit because he could not get down. When I asked him how he got up there, he told me that his friends stacked one another on their shoulders until he could climb a "human ladder" to the first branch. I thought about how well children are able to cooperate in teams and how much care they take toward one another as they relate. If only we, as adults, could remember how we did it when we were young.

Putting our energy into developing human understanding is one of the most effective ways to accomplish anything we undertake. Because communication and teamwork involve the dynamics of the self and the dynamics of others, we need a number of skills to accomplish the necessary steps that take us through the decision-making process, completion and follow-up. Taking the time to listen and to understand others, much like an act of kindness, is never wasted. The single act of listening will have continued, far reaching, ramifications, yet the skills necessary to build effective communication are often overlooked in our professional development offerings. In fact, the resistance toward change is so strong that I find most people I work with, who are some of the best and brightest in the field of education, will do anything and everything to avoid having to change their behavior relating to basic communication and team-building skills. Instead, they focus on steps to complete the task, identification of the problem, strategies for the solution and evaluation of the product, but cannot seem to focus in on the actual pieces involved in the process.

Extensive research indicates that collective decision-making is a more productive process than individual decision-making; often this fact is openly professed by everyone involved. Corporate and institutional agencies spend large amounts of money and valuable employee time evaluating awareness efforts, understanding and knowledge development, skill building and mission, value and belief systems.

If we know that the collective voice has wisdom and we believe in change implementation, then why does the team system not work in many large academic institutions? Research points to a number of key problems that often go undetected:

• Lack of interpersonal skills.
• Exclusive focus on task activities rather than facilitating team member relationships.
• Lack of team members' self-discipline and responsibility for their behavior and actions.
• Poor leadership and facilitation, often due to insufficient training and experience.
• Inability to understand diverse communication styles.

Of course, other issues can also be contributing factors, such as: the team structure being incompatible with the hierarchical organizational structure, lack of structure necessary to deal with team sizes, or even lack of commitment and support. My experience has been that the former items are the ones that larger agencies tend to sweep under the carpet. Large agencies, such as the one where I work with approximately 800 employees, make a committed effort and put a great deal of deliberate thought into the structure, commitment and support of teams. They fall short, however, when it comes to promoting seemingly insignificant skill development like listening skills vs. self promotion, team code of conduct vs. rigid policy development, respect vs. domination, trust vs. fear, conflict viewed as opportunities to explore new ideas vs. a threat to status quo of the powers that be, and a climate of self-examination vs. a climate of self emulation.

I suspect that at the bottom of this issue lies the idea that in almost every relationship, there are perceived or actual competitive interests and conflicts as well as relationship conflicts due to emotions, misperceptions, stereotypes, poor communication, miscommunication or repetitive negative behavior.

In the course of one week, I experienced a team member bias an entire group of people in an impetuous slight of the tongue, a member disengage an entire division of people by disregarding their written work, and alienation through decisions that did not include everyone and left no recourse other than to embarrass oneself by openly revolting. These examples do not point to individuals' incompetencies, but rather to the lack of skill development in teambuilding and communication. These are difficult issues that demand real focus on the part of leadership, however, these are the issues that leaders traditionally avoid. Everyone has experienced the sting of being in mid-sentence with a person in an elevator when the doors open and the person you are talking with immediately begins talking to someone who is perceived as more important than you. In most cases, the person is not even aware that they have displayed rude behavior or that they may need to pay more attention to their listening skills. Thank goodness I am not prone to taking offense. I am sure that I fall prey to many of these same weaknesses in my own daily life.

As an administrator, some have suggested that agencies work on these issues for the good of everyone. Unfortunately, we are not able to "pitch a fit" until our mothers come running. In the end, I suppose we are just up a tree until someone starts LISTENING!!!

       --Jean McComb

*We'd like to thank Jean McComb, an administrator in the field of education in Kentucky, for her contribution to this month's Educator's Voice.

TIP

Gradebook and Exam Builder Tips

Tip 1

If you want the Gradebook to calculate your students' exam/quiz grades in the correct percentages for the final course grade, you will need to determine the total number of points that a student can achieve in your course, including papers, participation, projects, other exams, etc., before you determine the number of points for each exam question.

For example, let's say a student can achieve a possible 1,000 points in your course. Then, for an exam that is worth 15 percent of the total grade, that exam would be worth 150 points. Then, for a 50-question test, each test question should be worth three points (150 points divided by 50 questions).

Tip 2

If you are using ungraded, auto-scored practice exams or quizzes in your course, using the Exam Builder, you will, of course, not want the score to be calculated into the student's final course grade. However, you will want them to see which questions they missed in the Gradebook, so they may review and prepare for the graded test.

Thus, when creating the practice questions, do not enter any points in the Exam Builder points box. This way, students will be able to view the auto-scored questions, with the correct answer explanations (if you have provided them). Note, however, that they will not get a calculated score summary of, say, 80 out of 100 points; they will only be able to view their autoscored questions.

       --Stephen Shugart, MFA