Edited by David Alcock, Wednesday, 8 May 2013, 07:02
It is hard to argue with Salas 'big 5' of teamwork (2005). In some ways they all seem too obvious to warrant being recognised and commented on. And yet, when one or more is not present it cn certainly affect teamwork negatively. I have recently been involved in the re-validation of a programme that I lead. This required me to liaise with a number of academic staff, and also a couple of senior figures within the School. As is the case with such activities we were up against a deadline and needed the support and commitent of all team members. Unfortunately one senior member of staff did not really have full ownership of our task and dropped out of the loop as far as communication was concerned. We found it difficult to accurately monitor mutual performance as a result of the lack of communication and we ended up without the required documentation ready by our deadine.
In addition to the above example of a failing in mutual performance monitoring I know from my experiences with problem based learning that it is etremely important for a team to possess a shared mental model of exctly what the task is. I would suggest that the definition given by Kay (2006) does not adequately identify the importance of a shared understanding of exactly what the task is. I have seen such shared understanding referred to as a superordinate goal.
In attempting to implement these concepts in this design studio activity we might ask each team member to define exactly what they understand the task to be. We could then write up some sorrt of learning contract that we can all agree to. In order to ensure that we work to the standards expresed in the big 5 it is important that we continually communicate with each other. Where we are in a distribute environment this is particularly important It might be interesting to see if we can use something such as twitter to more towards a slightly more synchronous form of communication. I think I might suggest that as a bit of an experiment.
Week 14, Activity 2.
It is hard to argue with Salas 'big 5' of teamwork (2005). In some ways they all seem too obvious to warrant being recognised and commented on. And yet, when one or more is not present it cn certainly affect teamwork negatively. I have recently been involved in the re-validation of a programme that I lead. This required me to liaise with a number of academic staff, and also a couple of senior figures within the School. As is the case with such activities we were up against a deadline and needed the support and commitent of all team members. Unfortunately one senior member of staff did not really have full ownership of our task and dropped out of the loop as far as communication was concerned. We found it difficult to accurately monitor mutual performance as a result of the lack of communication and we ended up without the required documentation ready by our deadine.
In addition to the above example of a failing in mutual performance monitoring I know from my experiences with problem based learning that it is etremely important for a team to possess a shared mental model of exctly what the task is. I would suggest that the definition given by Kay (2006) does not adequately identify the importance of a shared understanding of exactly what the task is. I have seen such shared understanding referred to as a superordinate goal.
In attempting to implement these concepts in this design studio activity we might ask each team member to define exactly what they understand the task to be. We could then write up some sorrt of learning contract that we can all agree to. In order to ensure that we work to the standards expresed in the big 5 it is important that we continually communicate with each other. Where we are in a distribute environment this is particularly important It might be interesting to see if we can use something such as twitter to more towards a slightly more synchronous form of communication. I think I might suggest that as a bit of an experiment.