Defensive routines and tolerance of skilled incompetence can harm student team performance. Strategies to overcome these problems include emphasizing the importance of process learning, teaching team development, providing practice in communication skills, coaching individual students, and providing graded feedback for process quality. (Contains…

Offers five recommendations for teachers or facilitators of team communication: (1) students should avoid groupthink; (2) offer students methods for reaching agreement in a timely manner; (3) vary subjects of group writing assignments; (4) encourage all students to be active participants; and (5) emphasize the importance of good writing skills to…

In study 1, 313 supervisor/supervisee pairs rated supervisees' professional expertise; supervisees gave themselves higher ratings. Study 2 compared 63 team leaders' and 593 team members' ratings of leaders, finding different perceptions of competence. Results suggest the use of self-other ratings can be improved through feedback, joint training…

Following a fire and a costly PCB cleanup at a Connecticut high school, the administrative staff learned valuable lessons. Districts must have an emergency management plan, provide accurate information, pursue alliances with media and agencies, issue daily press releases, develop a phone chain, and share the spotlight. (MLH)

For decades, business schools have advocated product development processes that utilize trans-organizational, cross-function teams. Is it time for business schools to apply this model to our own product: MBA graduates? In this paper, we describe the trans-organizational, team-based approach that has transformed product development in many…

The NO VACANCY sign has been hanging out at the Columbia-Montour Area Vocational-Technical School (CMAVTS) for the past several years. A variety of reasons may have contributed to the building being at full capacity. A new administrative director, Steve Walk, was hired in 1999 to change the image of the school. Since his arrival, High Schools That…

In this special issue, readers were introduced to three powerful, evidence-based instructional practices that hold great promise for ameliorating many of the reading difficulties encountered by pupils in 21st century classrooms. Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS), ClassWide Peer Tutoring (CWPT), and START tutoring have emerged from over…

Outcomes for methods to accelerate thinking skills involving some peer interaction have been more consistently positive than those for purely teacher-directed or materials-led methods. However, methods involving mainly or only peer interaction are rare. This paper describes and evaluates such a method for peer tutoring in thinking skills, which…

Examples are provided about ways to change professional and ethical practices to promote the creation of a culture that facilitates and equitably recognizes collaboratively produced scholarship. (Contains 1 table.)

This chapter addresses the logistical considerations for the use of collaborative learning in the Decoding the Disciplines model and presents twelve principles for successfully using teamwork in the classroom and several assessments of the efficacy of the group process. (Contains 2 figures.)

To date most models of empowerment have focused on teachers' personal empowerment, which is defined as intrinsic task motivation reflecting an employee's orientation to his or her work role. Interestingly, little scholarly attention has been turned to the interaction of empowerment and work-team membership, that is, to empowerment acquired from…

This study examines the effects of four team-based structures on the organizational commitment of elementary teachers in an urban school district. The study model focuses on organizational commitment and includes three intervening, endogenous variables: teacher empowerment, school communication, and work autonomy. Team teaching had both direct and…

The leadership role of the library media specialist is very important because it enhances the achievement level of the students. Information Power, Building Partnerships for Learning encourages library media specialists to be members of the leadership team, organize learning opportunities for members of the learning community, develop curriculum…

Tools to support knowledge elicitation are used more and more in situations where employees or students collaborate using the computer. Studies indicate that differences exist between experts and novices regarding their methods of work and reasoning. However, the commonly preferred approach tends to deal with team members as a single system with…

The reflecting team has been a respected mode of therapeutic intervention since psychiatrist Tom Anderson first proposed the concept in 1985 (Anderson, 1991). The notion of a team observing the therapist conducting a session, the reflecting team reflecting on the session in the presence of the client (either behind a one-way mirror or in person),…