instructors

Some Suggestions For Using Teams in the Classroom

Mark V. Redmond, Communication Studies, Greenlee School

Fundamental Questions

1. What's the goal in assigning the activity?
2. What skills do students need to complete the class activity?
Students need to be taught about how to work in teams. This includes understanding group dynamics and problem solving/task methods, and improving their own performance in a team. Doesn't need to be done in all classes, but needs to occur early on. In what class(es) should this occur?

The following represents a composite of information about groups and teams that can be shared with students to help increase their understanding of group dynamics and thus improve their performance on group assignments.

STRUCTURE: Groups develop a structure to accomplish their tasks. Duality of structure: structure guides interactions; interactions produce/re-produce structure.

1. Groups are systems. Actions of each person affects the overall group.

2. Member characteristics: The combination of the members' qualities determines the "team personality."

E-mail Assignment: Criteria for Evaluation

This section is structured around two main ISUComm goals. Materials under the "Learning to Communicate" section are more suitable for use in foundation and advanced communication courses. Those in the "Communicating to Learn" section apply to the use of communication in individual majors to strengthen student understanding of their disciplines. Both sections are subdivided into two types of materials. In "Teaching Aids" are materials specially developed for ISUComm teachers. These use the ISUComm pedagogy and integrate multimodal theory.

Currently, the ISUComm curriculum can be understood as composed of four components:

Foundation Communication. The two required ISUComm courses (English 150 and 250) have now replaced the former English 104 and 105, providing a more rigorous, more multimodal learning experience. ISU Instructors, along with many faculty from Iowa’s community colleges, have been trained in WOVE pedagogy through ongoing professional development workshops and presentations.

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth. He was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice.

But his great discovery was the use of letters.

Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt. To the king came Theuth and showed his inventions. King Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them.

Then they came to letters.

General Resources

DOC PDF WOVE Bibliography