Why Team Work?

Group Dynamics was taught by Chris from the group Piaget in the VOC 1-6 session. As a native English speaker, he was leading very naturally his teaching session to the warm atmosphere of discussion floor. How to engage with participants at the begging of the session was a crucial key of cultivating participants’ mind to be opened for discussions.

It seemed like the first warm-up exercise was irrelevant to the theme of the teaching, but it worked well with the purpose of creating an openness. It was an easy and simple question with the world map on a Padlet board, “If you were a country, which country would you be?” I could think of this teaching session as my most pleasant learning experience from the students’ performed teaching sessions in the VOC1 module.

Due to my previous work experience at Nokia, I was very familiar with the team role theory by Belbin. I have experienced various roles like specialist, completer, team leader, team worker, resource investigator. Team as a social learning environment, by playing the roles in a team we are getting more matured to know more about ourselves, and more development can be done through interactions with team members.

According to Dr. Bruce Tuckman’s 5 stages of team development model, a team starts from Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing to Adjourn stage. In this iVET program, I have experienced 3 different team settings for VOC1, VOC2 and EduSci.  

After experiencing team roles in the group Freire in VOC1, I think that it was quite a challenging time to go through all the 5 stages to perform team work, not really step by step but mixed with many stages at the same time. After then, with the new teams in VOC2 and EduSci module, it was much easier and faster, so we have gone straight from the forming to the norming or performing stage by-passing the storming stage. 

 To watch the Tuckmans's team development model video, please click here.