APPENDIX E: Responses and Outcomes for Team Video 3: Jamaal, Jim, Don, and Tonya

Appendix E:

Responses and Outcomes for Team Video 3: Jamaal, Jim, Don, and Tonya

The following information is based on observations of this student team and individual interviews conducted with Jamaal, Jim, Don, and Tonya at the end of their team project.

How did this project turn out?

The short clip you saw of team members dividing up tasks shows an apparently friendly group: there is little visible tension, everyone is volunteering for tasks, and the overall atmosphere seems easygoing and collegial. At the end of the project, most of the team members were still very enthusiastic and positive about how well their team had performed.

However, this group had one major problem: Don completely plagiarized his section of the report from the Internet. Only one group member (Jamaal) was aware of this, but Jamaal did not say anything to his teammates because he assumed that the instructor would not penalize the entire group if he discovered the plagiarism. Both Tonya and Jim knew that early on in the project Don had cut-and-pasted information from the Internet onto a handout that he had given to the group, but both of them assumed that he would consolidate this information on the final draft and put it in his own words. However, neither of them did more than skim the final draft for typos. Tonya volunteered that she did not read her teammates’ final contributions carefully because she was “so confident that . . . they could write and they were very articulate. [She] didn’t think [she] would be right in telling them to change things.”

What lesson should you learn from this team’s outcome?

This group illustrates that teamwork is much more than face-to-face communication. The group’s face-to-face interactions, while far from flawless, do not hint at the major disaster of this team’s final project. Although face-to-face interactions are important, they do not necessarily reflect the quality of a team’s written output. A person’s ability to communicate orally does not necessarily translate into good writing ability (or, in this case, writing ethics) — many people are good speakers but poor writers. Having oral conversations is not a substitute for critically reading and responding to a written draft.

Another variation on the problem of focusing on oral communication at the expense of written communication is reported by Rebecca Burnett (1996), who observed a 13-student cooperative learning (or co-op) team doing an internship at a major engineering research and development corporation. The students had held many oral conversations with one of the chemists in the lab and, based on these conversations, thought they were proceeding in the right direction — only to have this same chemist respond to their final draft by saying that their work was completely unacceptable and showed that they did not understand critical aspects of the basic technology process. When team members asked the chemist why he hadn’t mentioned these problems during previous conversations, he responded that until he had something to read — a coherent text that laid out ideas, explanations, and recommendations — he had no way of knowing about the fundamental gaps in their understanding.

In Burnett’s study, the students’ manager similarly noted how the process of simply drafting the table of contents revealed problems in the project: “It was in the process of deciding to put something on paper that . . . these vast differences in concepts started coming out.” Reflecting back, one of the students on the team agreed with the manager: “The structure of the report should have been the first thing that we did, even though we didn’t have . . . a lot of knowledge about [what] was going to be in it.”

These comments reflect the importance of tackling the written part of a project early (perhaps even with a straw document — see Chapter 2, “Project Management”) and of continually receiving feedback and making revisions on this document. If the students in Team Video 3 had had a stronger revision process and a commitment to truly revise and give feedback to one another, the plagiarism could have been caught before the project was submitted.

Work Cited

Burnett, R. (1996). “Some people weren’t able to contribute anything but their technical knowledge”: The anatomy of a dysfunctional team. In A. H. Duin & C. J. Hansen (Eds.), Nonacademic writing: Social theory and technology (pp. 123–156). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.