The plan for the first session of our semester is to facilitate and familiarize faculty with TAS (Team As Support).
TAS brings the engine of student ingenuity, generosity, and smarts into operation on behalf of other students within a team. Research has shown that the stronger the connections among team members and the more trust and safety generated within a team, the higher the level of performance and of satisfaction. In this way, TAS also prepares students for the world of work they will meet after graduation, one that is largely organized around teamwork. Teachers in Art, English, and Accounting at Kingsborough report the high impact of TAS on student performance and satisfaction.
Here’s the plan:
We will review the three key elements of this design:
1. Permanent teams (great ice breaker: create a team name!).
2. Rotating Team Leader: the team leader creates a focus (their “Possibility”) for the
their week of leadership, one that will “make a difference” in the life and
work of the team and submits a final “Outgoing Team Leader Report” at the
end of the week of their leadership assessing the team and writing about their
creative interventions on behalf of their team.
3. Creating the chats and zooms that connect teammates to one another along with a
Chief Technology Officer for the team to whom team members can go for
tech support within the team.
And we will review the three key ideas underpinning ideas that predict academic and team success:
1. Support: The job of each team member and of the team leader is to support the
work of their teammates and “make a difference.”
2. Possibility: This is a pedagogy of hope in which team leader and students create
actionable and aspirational “possibilities.”
3. Breakdown/ breakthrough: This design removes the stigma of student failures
and self-doubt by training them to see their errors (on all levels – in life
as well as when it comes to the placement of the period in a sentence)as “breakdowns” – or really – opportunities for breakthrough. And it
provides them with an explicit methodology (and practice) in how to do this!
