To finish this lesson, you must complete the activities listed below. You may find it useful to print this page so that you can follow along with the directions.
Step | Activity | Access/Directions |
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1 | Read the lesson Overview and Checklist. | You are in the Lesson 6 online content now. The Overview page is previous to this page, and you are on the Checklist page right now. |
2 | Online material (Read) Building the Team [1] |
There are three different styles of reading that are referred to in the lessons:
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3 | Begin Capstone Activity. | Complete:
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4 | Read lesson Summary. | You are in the Lesson 6 online content now. Click on the "Next Page" link to access the Summary. |
A group is a collection of individuals who gather and interact for a common purpose. For example, a study group. They gather and usually focus their attention on an activity or common interest. They may or may not have stated goals or rules to govern membership in the group. Being a member of a group probably requires minimal expertise and may or may not be professional in nature. A team is a specialized group. Team members also have a common objective or purpose, but focus on performance and collective improvement. An example would be an emergency medical team. Teams frequently have structure and certain criteria for membership. Teams almost always have stated goals. Team members frequently have an area of expertise and may be professionals.
Teams and groups differ most in their focus on performance and improvement. A team focuses on its collective performance and usually offers members opportunity to improve incrementally over time. Individuals on a team are dependent on one another to achieve their goal. Their performance affects others on the team and its results. Team members take mutual responsibility and are accountable for results. Groups do interact and may work together well, but they usually do not have a requirement for collective and incremental performance. Success in the group is not dependent on how others perform and individuals take responsibility for their own successes. Accountability is usually at the individual level, not the group level. In short, all teams are groups, but not all groups are teams.
Effective teams don’t succeed by happenstance. They all have certain things in common in addition to their focus on performance and collective improvement. In general, members are clear on the team objective. They are capable and committed to meeting the objective. They work in a trusting, collaborative way to achieve the objective. Those two concepts, trust and commitment, are the glue that holds teams together.
The structure of any effective team rests on a foundation of trust and commitment. Trust comes from the confidence the members have in you, the leader, and in each other—and from their sense of how much they can rely on you and each other. Commitment is each individual’s motivation and willingness to belong to the team and help achieve the defined goals. Both are equally essential to the team’s effectiveness. The leader's job is to foster these two aspects of the team, ensure they continue to grow, and sustain them in the face of other variables and obstacles during your mission. These nine attributes of effective teams show you where to focus.
Like individuals, teams mature at different rates. But almost every team goes through the following three key stages. Generally, as your teams progress through these stages, members will demonstrate or develop the nine key elements of effective teams.
Team building can be defined as group cooperative learning to try and solve a challenge.
have a long lasting positive influence throughout your classroom in many different areas.
Purpose: Task A is to identify and organize your design team.
Deliverable: A list of team members with possible roles. Be certain to identify the team leader.
Background: It can be said that GIS design is a team sport. What does this mean? This is a vision in which design is an enterprise with the focus of collaboration shifting away from coordination of draft products toward regular discussion of design early in the research phase. It is driven in part by the growing complexity and need for multidisciplinary input when developing a design; the need to share information across organizational boundaries; and the need to identify and explore the validity of alternatives. It is enabled by advances in social networking practices. It is important to note that team-based design brings a new set of challenges comparable to the cognitive limitations and pitfalls faced by the individual design Design teams have become inseparable because of the:
A “design team” is a network of individuals devoted to vetting ideas which helps make better geospatial decisions. This team is more akin to debating team than a sympathetic support group. An effective team:
Our team should be a rich mix of individuals meeting the following:
Perform the following: Identify and organize your design team.
Lesson 6 is the second of three lessons in the course capstone experience.