Appendix D

Responses and Outcomes for Team Video 2: Shelly, Will, and Ben

The following information is based on individual interviews conducted with Shelly, Will, and Ben at the end of their team project. In addition to commenting on the project in general, each of them viewed this video. This video was also viewed by an instructor with experience in guiding team projects.

What did the students think about their team?

Shelly was largely satisfied with the project and the way the team divided the work, which she described as going down the list of information required for the proposal and dividing the tasks at random by assigning them to “Shelly, Will, Ben, Shelly, Will, Ben.” She felt that the project ran smoothly, although at times she would have liked to review information before her teammates turned it in.

Will described Shelly as “pretty much taking charge” and doing a good job as leader; he described Ben as doing “exactly what he was asked but not much more than that.” Will expressed some dissatisfaction with what the team turned in, saying that “the style is still reasonable but the message kind of gets lost. There’s a continuity problem.” He felt that by handing out five copies of a 20-page document, Shelly deterred him from critiquing anything. As Will said:

I reviewed the sections to make sure there weren’t any gross errors. But looking at it, there’s that section I was talking about and a couple of typos and a couple of weird sentence structure things, but nothing that’s a crisis. And to print out another five copies of that at 20 pages apiece, I didn’t want to put her through the trouble of it.

However, Will never expressed any of his dissatisfaction to his teammates because he doesn’t like confrontation and felt that the final document was “acceptable.” Overall, Will described the team as “just three people who happened to turn in one thing.”

Ben also noted that the teammates did not critique one another’s work. He wished that the project could have been more of a learning experience because he did not really understand the content of the parts of the proposal that his teammates wrote. When Ben was asked about his body language in the video and his tendency to sit apart from his teammates, he said, “That’s a good question. I guess I like, kind of like being on the outside looking in.” Still, he worried that he might be giving “an impression that I don’t really care ’cause I am not part of the group. But really I am. I was just trying to sit back and, uh, listen to what they were saying.”

What did an instructor have to say about this team interaction?

John Wang: Well, they’re not fighting, but they’re not really collaborating either. They have no plan and are just kind of doing everything by the seat of their pants. Nobody knows what the others are doing. . . . I don’t know, but it seems to me like it’s going to be a very disjointed project. . . . At an absolute minimum, any document should go through one round of review, but they’re not even doing that. I would describe this as a very weak team.