The goal of this Seminar is to allow faculty to hear the experiences of different teachers who are now using TAS: Team As Support.
The plan is to give a brief overview of the three organizing principles of TAS (permanent teams with team names; weekly rotating Team Leaders: chats and zooms used to keep teams connected at all times) and to review the three guiding ideas of TAS (support, possibility, using “breakdowns” as the opportunity to create meaningful “breakthroughs”).
We hope to then move on to help teachers explore the question of whether this program is of interest to them. We hope to address the following questions:
1. What do students write about their team experiences?
2. Why and how does the framework of “support” create higher performance and more student satisfaction in the classroom and in the workforce?
3. What are the experiences of our faculty with this practice in both synchronous and asynchronous situations?
4. How does this model teach collaboration, leadership, and generosity while helping students to more powerfully master their course content?
5. How does this model powerfully train students for the workforce they will meet in the challenging team-oriented larger world of work they will encounter upon graduation?
One issue that has come up in classes is that some students may put in more effort into their team than others. We reviewed a mathematical method used to calculate the level of each student’s contribution to their team which is factored into their final grade.
We also brainstormed about methods of turning our soft data – the writing of our students about their experiences – into hard data and looked at some student writing about teams.
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