The Future of Teaching and Learning is Teams: What If Education Were Transformed One Team at a Time?
Why a team? Why teaming in education? Why teamED? The power of learning and working in teams is more necessary than ever. This Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous, and Hyperconnected (VUCAH) world is real, and a challenge for a single person in their silo. How can we move from silos to team cultures where educators and learners become members of a network of teams? And what might this look like for school leaders?
Working alone in the world of education has been part of the air we breathe for so long that we don’t give a second thought to common statements like “When you return to your classroom,” “I have organized my classroom to achieve…” or “We should coordinate what happens in each of our classrooms.” In education, working in effective teams is rare in training and practice, in both highly effective schools and those struggling to develop relevant teaching and learning experiences in their communities.
You may think: Hey… That's not exactly true… We can’t generalize, of course. So let’s acknowledge that some teachers and students may already be working in groups. Yet, how many are collaborating and succeeding as members of effective teams? Working together may not equal collaborating in a safe environment where we can all grow together. Teaming implies much more than the sum of parts. It’s more about exponential growth for every member of the team and their system: a classroom, a pedagogical team, a school board, a whole organization.
The Life Journey of a Team: Plant the Seeds, Nurture the Team & Flourish Together
Teamwork doesn’t happen by simply asking a group of people to work together. Unfortunately, in this high-speed world, most groups may go straight to their “to-do” list. But, what if we invested some time at the beginning to create a trustful teaming environment? We’d be planting the seeds for the team to flow with the ups and downs.
In this article, we’ll guide you, first, through the essentials of a team, including team formation and our ‘Four Quadrant’ framework. Second, we share three strategies that can help educators truly collaborate and flow together on the journey to better teaming. These strategies include reflective dialogue for positive team growth, unraveling bias for flowing with challenges, and the "What Works" framework for decision-making. And finally, we hope to inspire you to flourish in every team you’re a part of.
Let’s start by planting seeds by focusing on the core: What does a team need to successfully achieve its goals? Experience, research, and life led us to identify these team essentials: trust, a common purpose, and effective communication. For this article, we focus on the power of trust. Teams thrive when there is a high level of trust between individuals. In many cases, it takes time to develop trust, but the young people we learn with can’t wait years or decades for trust to develop. Our experience is that trust among team members can be hastened through shared moments like sharing stories, cooking a meal, and adventuring together. In a few hours or days, teams that focus on connection build deep trust that allows them to grow together as a team. For example, we’ve seen groups start the school year with an atypical agenda for the first 2 or 3 days, in an informal setting with activities focused on getting to know each other and supporting positive relationships. Those seeds allowed both learners and teachers to feel like a team, a community where learning could happen smoothly thanks to a culture of trust.
Nurturing this level of trust is most helpful if we begin by identifying the skills a team needs to successfully achieve a shared common goal, and from there, by identifying each teammate’s strengths. We created the four-quadrant framework as a way to support the creation of great teams.
The Four Quadrants.
Team composition begins with understanding the strengths of each teammate. Great teams are formed when each teammate offers their greatest strengths while growing in areas of need with support from the team.
Accelerating Awareness signifies that phase of a career or project where we feel we are “drinking from a firehose.” We might be overwhelmed by the pace and scale of what we are asked to understand minute by minute. Building Credibility emerges the day your peers ask for your contributions to the team for a particular skill or action. Developing Insight is possible when we slow down our learning enough to reflect on our practice, with the potential of Sharing Wisdom with our team.
For individual team members to better understand who brings what to the team and move between quadrants, we suggest steps to examine the composition of your team. This can be done in four steps, using a simple matrix.
Step 1. Teammates agree on and list the skills they will require to achieve their shared purpose.
Step 2. Each team member conducts a self-assessment to indicate which of the four quadrants they believe they fall within for each skill. The first column of the matrix represents Accelerating Awareness (AA); the second, Building Credibility (BC); the third, Developing Insight (DI); and the fourth, Sharing Wisdom (SW).
Step 3. The team brings their assessments together to identify areas of strength and growth, both individually and as a team. Each member is represented by a different shape or color on the matrix. Take the time to discuss self-assessments and get feedback from peers.
Step 4. Teammates with wisdom to share are encouraged to support their peers according to teammates' needs. No matter where each team member finds themselves, the potential for growth through practice, reflection, feedback, and revised practice allows for significant shifts.
After the seeds of trust are sown and the four-quadrant analysis is initiated, it’s time to nurture our team so we can all grow and flow in it. Creating or expanding a toolbox of strategies will help us cultivate positive relationships and a positive culture in the team, overcome and even prevent challenges from developing, and make wiser and more effective decisions. Following, we share three of many practical ways to enrich your toolbox with strategies you can put into practice with any team.
1. Reflective Dialogue, a Strategy for Positive Team Growth.
Participants role-play a fictional decision-making challenge typically found within learning communities, facilitate a decision-making process for a local issue, and conclude with participant-led use of the decision-making process for a pressing concern.
The facilitator summarizes the challenge and asks what the group would recommend. For example, how might the dining experience make a positive contribution to learning? Leave at least 30 seconds before anyone in the group speaks. Leave at least 30 seconds before the next person speaks. Periodically, the facilitator should summarize the contributions of the group in the form of a question: “Am I hearing that we could…?” Repeat the whole process at least three times.
If you have a hard time with the silence between speakers, reflect on these questions before speaking:
What did the last speaker say?
What was the most important thing they just shared?
What do I think about what was shared?
What new insights do I have to contribute?
Do I have anything to share, or is the continued silence more helpful?
2. Unraveling Bias, a Strategy for Flowing with Challenges.
This 7-step design process can guide your team through the work of unraveling bias in an equitable, just, and personalized way. The framework creates an interactive process for you to address bias both as an individual and collective group.
Step 1: Understand bias (empathize). This step provides individuals the space to build empathy, begin to shift and change perspective, and see through different lenses and ways of thinking. This step evolves as you do this work; it might start with simply understanding that bias exists and end up transforming your work and reflective processes. Questions an individual or team might ask include What is bias? Why does understanding bias matter? How does it impact individuals, including myself and those around me? How does it impact me being an effective teammate?
Step 2: Recognize (accept) that you hold biases. Engage with initial impressions and snap judgments that are shaped by our experiences and exposures over time. Hold intentional space to acknowledge and identify where biases exist.
Step 3: Identify (define) what your biases are. Take assessments and conduct reflection activities to identify these biases. You can start with Harvard's Implicit Association Test (IAT) to begin this initial assessment.
Step 4: Examine (ideate) your own biases and their effects on yourself and others. This will provide a better understanding of yourself, the reasons you hold these biases, and why they’re important to address. It will also help you remove any blinders you may have and better understand how all seven of these unraveling bias strategies might impact you, your classroom, and your team.
Step 5: Develop (prototype) strategies to address your own biases. These strategies should be purposeful and specific to your needs, considering how biases might present themselves in actions and words. For example, if you find you have gender bias and notice that you tend to experience or even assign more gender-specific roles, you might create strategies that assign roles and responsibilities based on strengths, interests, willingness, and motivation instead.
Step 6: Apply your strategies to test biases when you recognize them. Put your planning into practice, recognize biases, and utilize your strategies. For example, the use of pronouns in introductions, email signatures, online bios, names online, etc., works to cultivate spaces where pronouns are used and respected. It also prepares you for dialogue with others who may disagree. In this way, you prepare for interactions that work towards safe and inclusive environments.
Step 7: Reflect on the effectiveness of the strategy. As a team, have discussions surrounding this work. Questions you might ask include How did it impact my perceptions? How did it impact others? Am I thinking and feeling differently? Do I have new understandings? These discussions can lead to identifying Guiding Principles. For example, “We aspire to be conscious of the bias we bring to our work together and actively seek to make decisions that are not influenced by that bias.”
3. The “What Works” Framework, a Strategy for Decision-Making.
It is common to share information with a group and ask for feedback. We recommend three simple questions to shape feedback:
“What Works?”
“What Could Be Better?”
“What’s Missing?”
The feedback that emerges from these three simple questions helps us understand the options and opportunities for improvement more deeply.
Finally, once the seeds are planted, the team is nurtured, and the toolbox of strategies is in hand, it’s time for the team to flourish! It may seem easy on paper, but how does that work in real life? Begin by adding the strategies just shared to the ones you already know. Explore if they could work, or not, for you and your specific team. Having a rich toolbox of strategies will allow you to apply those that suit your team at any moment in your team journey.
Let’s not waste any more time! The world is facing significant environmental, socioemotional, and economic challenges. Time is short for addressing those challenges. We can embrace the wisdom of the many voices around the world that tackle challenges in collective teams and create a positive future, one team at a time. One of the most revolutionary things we can do in education is to work together, and it doesn’t cost a penny to implement!
You may be a leader, an educator, a learner of any age, eager to ignite transformation in the setting of your school, learning ecosystem, institution, district, or other place of work. Each of us has a role in creating a team, navigating through challenges, and embracing opportunities to nurture and grow the culture of that team. Start with initial milestones your school or organization can achieve easily, so that your positive energy is perceived and sensed in the community, and everyone wants more. Thus, the entire community will embrace the changes that drive transformation from the heart. Don’t know where to start, or feel you have no power to drive transformation in a whole organization? Start by transforming yourself. You will see how your environment starts changing.
Gather your team, co-create a shared vision, and transform your organizational structure. Yes, and… Have some fun along the way! As you do the work, share your experiences with your peers, our team, and the whole world. You will help shape the future of teams and a better world.
If you want to know more and enrich your toolbox, enjoy the full book!
Erin O’Reilly (she/her) - Erin O'Reilly is a doctoral candidate and adjunct professor in Teaching and Learning at the University of Montana focused on innovative teacher preparation for the world we live in and the world we want to create. She is deeply committed to empowering educators to become agents of change who can positively impact their students and communities. A social studies teacher at heart, Erin brings experience from both K-12 and higher education. A professionally licensed educator and administrator in Montana, her academic background includes a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and History, a Master's in Educational Leadership, and doctoral work in Teaching and Learning. She collaborates with professionals around the world to create innovative pathways for teaching and learning while advocating for inclusive and collaborative spaces and practices to ensure the success of all learners.
Mar Cano (she/her) - Mar Cano is a dynamic educational professional committed to fostering social transformation through innovative learning practices. With a deep passion for lifelong, life-deep and life-wide learning, she has dedicated more than her 20-year career to advancing education on a glocal scale. Mar is recognized as an "eduknowmad," engaging in diverse educational roles such as trainer of trainers, facilitator, coordinator, mentor, speaker, and writer. Her work in pedagogical innovation, active methodologies, and alternative paradigms to foster 360º learning has taken her to educational ecosystems worldwide. In recent years, Mar has focused on teacher training, team leadership and facilitation, and educational and learning innovation both in Catalonia (Spain) and around the world.
Nick Salmon (he/him) - Nick Salmon of the Collaborative Learning Network is a ninth-generation educator focused on educational visioning, professional learning experiences for teachers, and design support for future-flexible learning environments. His global practice covers 42 US States, 22 time zones, and 35 countries on 6 continents. He is the world’s first and only self-certified furniture whisperer, capable of coaxing the best possible performance from the unruliest furnishings. Nick is the co-founder of a network of collectively flourishing USTAWI Global Learning Communities where relationships, learning, and communities come alive.