I had time over winter break to reflect on how effective I felt my focus school team and collaborative cohort writing team had progressed in the tasks we faced this past semester. A lot of hard working hours were put in, but positive results truly emerged. I know my writing skills have been enhanced by working with the two other cohort members in my program evaluation group. When we met, it became quite comical at times as we edited and re-edited our papers looking for sentence “parallelism” and being ever so careful not to overuse commas. However, I felt I got a deeper understanding of the program evaluation process by being exposed to my group’s varying perspectives and the discussions we held.
On the work level, I thought about an article I recently read written by Elena Aguilar entitled, “Effective Teams: The Key to Transforming Schools.” The article highlighted the idea that strong teams within a school are essential to retaining and sustaining teachers, and that if a team is effective, then people learn from each other. I am in total agreement with this. This school year, I have had the opportunity to work with colleagues that hadn’t worked with in years. The trust and respect is there, and we work very well as a team sharing ideas and teaching strategies that enhance our teaching styles.
Finally, Aguilar denotes in the article what she feels makes a good team. See if you agree or disagree with her thoughts:
- A good team knows why it exists.
-A good team creates a space for learning.
-In a good team, there’s healthy conflict.
-Members of a good team trust each other.
-A good team has a facilitator, leader, or shared leaders.
Thanks for sharing these thoughts on teams. The first two are especially poignant to me; knowing why the team exists, and have a space and time for learning I think are important, too. I’ve been parts of teams before where there wasn’t always a collective understanding of why we existed… or there was never time for team learning.
Important concepts! One of the most important things a team can do is be sure to clarify its purpose – sometimes it changes and folks forget to revisit and recenter themselves.
I like the “healthy conflict” concept; with that and other items mentioned I see tight connections to our “Five Dysfunctions…” text.
As all of you move to your Capstone experience, particularly in working with different teams, it will be very important to revisit effective team behaviors and make a conscious effort to keep them front and center!