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Establish who and what is involved

Understand the teamwork assessment task

There are 2 important things to remember when establishing your team. These are to identify and analyse:

what the assessment task is asking you to do
what is the desired output (e.g. a research paper, a poster, an oral presentation, a report).

You must also identify all the specific subtasks early on, so that you can properly estimate the time required to complete each of them. Subtasks may include: planning and outlining a paper/presentation, conducting research, gathering information, writing up different sections, and designing a presentation. You can use the marking rubric and assessment task instructions to guide the timetabling of these subtasks.

Get to know one another

It’s hard to work as a team if you are not familiar with your team members. You will often find that your lecturer/tutor will assign students to teams, so you won’t always get to work with your friends. Therefore, from the moment a team is formed, it’s important to identify as a team:

Each member comes with their own knowledge, experiences and skill sets. For example, one member might prefer to do research, while another might be excellent at creating visually-appealing slides for a presentation. A third member might be very good at academic writing or statistics.
To find out about your team members, you can talk about your life and learning experiences and interests as an icebreaker in your initial meeting. Talking about these early on will ensure that everyone will know what each member is most suited to doing.
You will need to work out each member’s availability for meetings. Everyone will have different commitments (e.g. study for other subjects, paid work, volunteering, family), and some might be studying part-time. Part of getting to know your team is about communicating your individual preferences for having meetings in or after class, on a daily, weekly or fortnightly basis, as well as whether you would like to meet in person and/or online, recorded and/or live.
It is also important that you share with each other whether you are based on campus or not. For example, if some team members are in different time zones, you will need to factor this in when organising the time of your meetings.
You will also need to collectively choose which tool(s) to use for your communications. Some options include communicating via text message, telephone calls, WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, Messenger, and Zoom. You need to be inclusive in your choice of communication tool(s) as not everyone may have access to a particular technology.

Establish clear and realistic goals

From the moment the assessment is assigned and your group is created, it’s essential to devise a timeline for the completion of tasks and subtasks and the delivery of the entire project. To achieve this, the team must set up clear and realistic goals.

Clear in the sense that the goals respond to each of the requirements outlined in the assessment task instructions.
Realistic in that you take into account the time needed to complete and review each subtask, as well as the time each member has at their disposal to work on them.

The takeaway message here is that as a team, you need to clearly communicate about who is responsible for what, when it’s due, and when it’s done.

Here are 6 pointers to help you identify and express clear and realistic goals:

Be specific with what you need/want to achieve. This relates to both you as an individual and you as a team. For example, saying “I’ll do research by next week” isn’t a clear goal.
To be more specific, you could instead say:
By our next meeting, I plan to have researched and identified four peer-reviewed journal articles that we can use for our group assessment task.
Tasks need to be divided into smaller, more achievable parts. All team members need to be absolutely clear as to what each part involves and how these, in turn, fit into the timeline of due dates.
Here is an example of how you can individually unpack a task into more manageable steps:
First, I’ll read in more detail the two articles from the unit that relate to our topic. Then, from the authors mentioned in these articles, I’ll use them to develop a search strategy to look for other related readings in Google Scholar and on the Library’s Search. If I can’t find sufficient material to use, I’ll search on the recommended databases, and if this still doesn’t work, I’ll ask the lecturer.
If you have agreed to take on a subtask, you need to take responsibility for completing it to a high-standard by the set deadline. Everyone in a team must learn to hold themselves accountable and be accountable to the other team members.
For example, you can have a team-mate track your progress with regular check-ins to make sure your work is to the agreed standard and you meet deadlines. You can do the same for them. They can be your ‘check-in buddy’ on the team.
Recognition of your weaknesses is essential to making goals transparent and achievable.
For example, if you agree to take on the subtask of creating online polls, but realise you do not have the necessary digital skills nor interest to do this, then you should talk to your team-mates. Others might be going through a similar experience, and chances are that you can get some help or work out a subtask swap that suits you all better.
As a team, you need to carefully monitor the progress of subtasks to meet deadlines. Ensure information is kept and shared in ways that the entire group knows what is going on.
We feel good about ourselves when we can see and share a goal we have achieved. Let your team know when you have partially or completely completed a subtask or reached a milestone, and recognise your team-mates’ achievements when they do so as well.
Regardless of how difficult the assessment task or the subject might be, working in groups is a great opportunity to have fun and develop new friendships or deepen existing ones. Also, who knows if one day in the future, you and one or more of your team-mates might end up as colleagues working in the same company.

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Student Academic Success

Student Academic Success

Establish who and what is involved

Understand the teamwork assessment task

Get to know one another

Establish clear and realistic goals