Martijn van der Kamp and Caroline Sanz-Veitch reflect on how the initiative “Teams@Monash” contributes to teamwork education and practices across Monash.

Teamwork (education), a grand challenge?

Teamwork is an important job-ready skill, a major part of the student experience at Monash, and crucial not only in our everyday work but also in addressing complex challenges such as climate change, geopolitical tensions and thriving communities. 

The desire for and importance of teamwork and collaboration is growing — on job-platform, Seek, 164,049 of their 185,262 ads listed across Australia over the last 30 days, mention the word ‘team’ (Seek, Nov 11); the UN Global Goals even have a separate goal on ‘Partnership’, and the Monash Impact 2030 strategy builds on the core value of ‘collaboration’, further reflected in our teaching and research strategies. 

Yet, teamwork is often bemoaned as a bit of a pain and hated by students and educators alike (Reibe, 2016). It’s pretty clear there is little consistency in the student teamwork experience across units and programs and students don’t know how to work in teams or be good team members. Most curricula do not structurally include teamwork education and favour a short-term focus on discipline-specific content left to the devices of uncoordinated “groups”. Most academics are experts in other fields and are largely unfamiliar with teamwork basics let alone how to facilitate teamwork. If we really think about it, for a long time, research and teaching were not set up to enable team efforts. As a result, academics (like many others) focus on teamwork outcomes rather than the collaborative process.

Approaches to teamwork are commonly based on the assumption that ‘we all know how to do teamwork, right?’. The practice of teamwork is, however, rapidly evolving with increasing student diversity, hybrid and online team learning, international collaboration, the complexity of team challenges and multidisciplinary solutions, and the variety of technological solutions, including AI. 

For all these reasons, in 2022, we set out to improve the student and educator teamwork experience at Monash.

Teams@Monash: a co-design initiative

Teams@Monash is an initiative that aims to embrace the power of teamwork and co-design to enrich the teamwork experience for students, educators, and employers. To us, co-design means listening to and working closely together with people who have first-hand experience in teamwork, including students, diverse types of teams and facilitators/educators, and arriving at holistic and tangible solutions together — building capacity as we go. The key principle is “doing with”, not “doing to”. 

Therefore, over 2022-23, Teams@Monash engaged a community of around 30 educators and learning designers across seven faculties. As a first step, we addressed the barriers that educators experience when teaching teamwork, as this seemed critical to understanding some of the root causes of effective teamwork education.

Initially, we conducted over 20 interviews to:

1. Identify key barriers to effective teaching or facilitating of student teamwork
2. Understand what teamwork-based resources exist and who ‘owns’ or ‘disseminates’ them
3. Identify the current and most common approaches to facilitating teamwork
4. Determine the quality of teamwork, how it is defined and how effectiveness is measured

To validate and test our learnings, we conducted a series of workshops in which we built on themes that arose from the interviews. Part of co-design is allowing space for solutions to emerge from those you’re designing with, rather than prescribing them upfront. So, with educators, we ran two sessions that delved deeper into their experiences, the key barriers to teamwork education and the breadth of design directions they envisioned to tackle the challenges they were experiencing. In a third workshop, with learning designers, we started diving deeper into this collection of design directions, before prioritising our efforts towards a more targeted set of these directions for us to co-develop, test and validate with educators, as well as students and industry, hoping for both practical and scalable outcomes.

Following our initial workshops, we have now presented at several university forums, such as the learning and teaching week, and a faculty education workshop, where we have continued and extended our conversations about teamwork, testing our thinking early and often. 

So, in the spirit of collaboration, let’s do that here as well!

The suggested design directions

So this is where you come in! Below we have some interesting design directions, which include some tensions, we are keen to pursue next. We eagerly welcome you to stress test them with us.

From the interviews and workshops, we have narrowed in on four key streams of work that could help create a model for teamwork at Monash that we explore below (see Figure 1)  — but it is also worth noting two key challenges amongst these that have stood out: 

1. The diversity of teamwork across faculties. Different faculties rely on different approaches to teamwork in terms of use, education, and management. 
2. The recognition that teamwork is a complex skill that cannot be taught in one unit alone.

The first design direction addresses the problem of consistency, and from our exploration, calls for establishing teamwork concepts and minimum standards to improve longer-term experience of teamwork across units and programs, as well as providing more assurance to students and employers about the (level of) teamwork skills students walk away with after finishing their program.

The second direction acknowledges that it takes more than one “go” at teamwork to embed it as a practice, and thus focuses on teamwork scaffolding across programs, and highlights looking at mapping current teaching and assessment practices, providing example curriculum maps, and guides for team teaching.

A third direction recognises the need for practical ways forward, focusing on the role of technology and scalable applications to support teamwork across the university. This component comes from our findings that there needs to be a combination of supportive tools, systems, applications that can support educators and students to effectively engage in teamwork practices — allowing them to both develop their capabilities as well as create strong foundations for their teamwork practice.

A fourth direction leans into a key tenant of teamwork, reflection, and suggests we set up systems to monitor and evaluate the initiatives through educational research. We recognise that part of the contribution of this work is understanding what is working and what is not, as we develop these practices and models. This may be made up of specific research projects as well as the development of underlying measurement and evaluation for the holistic project itself. 

Next challenges and questions for you

A big revelation to us was the diversity of how teamwork is implemented, taught, and understood in different faculties. This raises questions around the scalability and transferability of teamwork practices across faculties, and therefore also what (if any) a common definition of teamwork might look like?

So along with exploring the directions above, let us ask you:

1. What does teamwork mean to you, and how does your faculty/department go about teamwork education? (e.g. how is it integrated into programs/units, which ones, what are the current barriers; which tools are used?)
   
2. What is your response to the solution directions above? What are your comments, questions, suggestions?

We’d appreciate seeing your discussion of these questions in the comment section below.

Monash the most collaborative university?

Teams@Monash directly supports the Impact 2030 strategy and its core value of ‘Collaboration’ as well as getting students ready for jobs for the future, leadership skills, and industry partnerships. Collaboration is essential in addressing the challenges of the Age. Teams@Monash aims to support our own thriving community with safer, more inclusive, effective and fun teams. 

In conclusion, building on teamwork across faculties, Teams@Monash supports building a solid foundation for Monash to become the most collaborative university. The initiative provides a framework and practical approaches to support the teamwork experience of students, staff, and employers, ensuring they are part of the solution — not just the beneficiaries. 

Are you keen to join the conversation? Please let us know!

References

Riebe, L., Girardi, A., & Whitsed, C. (2016). A Systematic Literature Review of Teamwork Pedagogy in Higher Education. Small Group Research, 47(6), 619-664.