Teaching Teamwork Competencies with Dr. Ricardo Flores

Sarah 

Welcome to the Let’s Talk About Teaching podcast, a podcast dedicated to exploring innovative teaching practices in post-secondary education, examining the day-to-day challenges of implementing and uncovering strategies for success. We’re excited to take this conversation further and continue sharing wonderful stories and insights from educators here at UVic that inspire us to reflect and grow. My name is Sarah and my pronouns are she/her. I am a Curriculum Developer specializing in STEM pedagogy with Learning and Teaching Innovation, also known as LTI, at the University of Victoria. 

Jeremy 

And I am your co-host, Jeremy. My pronouns are he/him and I am a Curriculum Developer with LTI specializing in large class pedagogy. 

Sarah 

Before we begin, we would like to acknowledge and show respect to the Lək̓ʷəŋən, Songhees and Xʷsepsəm/Esquimalt Peoples on whose territory the university stands and Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.  

In this episode, “Teaching Teamwork Competencies”, we are exploring innovative ways that instructors can create successful student teams in a classroom and incorporate teamwork as a course learning outcome. 

Jeremy 

Today we are joined by a former guest on this podcast, Dr. Ricardo Flores (he/him) who is an Associate Professor at the Gustavson School of Business and co-author of a recent book on this topic called Group and Teamwork.  

His courses at UVic include Inclusive Leadership, Organizational Theory, and Strategy & Business Fundamentals. Dr. Flores co-authored his book with Dr. Antonina Bauman, Associate Professor at the Baker School of Business at the Citadel.  

Dr. Flores is also a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Management Studies and is a winner of several awards for teaching, research, and service. 

Sarah 

Hello, Ricardo! Welcome back to the podcast. 

Ricardo 

Thank you for having me. 

Sarah 

Before we dive into this discussion about teaching teamwork competencies, we would really love to hear more about you and the courses that you teach. What tends to be the degree level format and size involved in your classes? 

Ricardo 

Of course! Since I’m so old and I’ve been doing this for such a long time… I’ve been teaching quite a few different courses. Lately, I’ve been teaching Strategic Management, International Business, Corporate Strategy, Leadership, Cross-cultural Management, but in all of them, I’ve had the privilege, if you want, of having small-sized classes, large-sized classes, completely face-to-face, hybrid, [and] completely online… so, a large range of experiences alongside with how many years I’ve been doing this is what gives me a little bit of the perspective of understanding how important it is for each of these different contexts that you face… that you have to design and think about how you want to achieve the learning goals that you are hoping to achieve in your class a little bit differently. 

Jeremy 

Now, when you joined us for a podcast last year, you mentioned that you were writing a book on teaching teamwork competencies. Can you tell us more about it and how your views on this topic changed or evolved based on the research that you did for that book? 

Ricardo 

Of course. Happy to share a little bit about my experience working on this.  

The biggest challenge was recognizing how dramatically different instructor realities are. What I’m talking about is that there are people who teach 20 MBA students, while other colleagues teach 300 undergrads in the first year… and some of them have to teach this online [and] some of them have to teach this face-to-face.  

So, when thinking about writing a book on how to teach teamwork and developing the skills and competencies of the students working with others, we had to keep in mind that reality… to create that framework that eventually we developed with my co-author. What we were looking for was being rigorous but also practical and having this diverse context in mind. So, what that pushed us [to do] was to create a framework that we call the “circle of influences” that is designed to help instructors to make thoughtful decisions based on their specific context rather than following some one-size-fits-all recipe.  

The research that we did revealed something that we consider troubling, students complain and complain about the projects they are engaged [in]. Professors struggle with dysfunctional teams. Administrators talk about how this creates conflict within programs. So, there is something here that is not working.  

We believe that, based on the work that we did for the book, the problem is that you can’t just casually add teamwork and teamwork-learning goals within your course without thinking what that means for you and for the students involved, because the reality is that if you do include these type of activities, you need to become a coach, a facilitator and a conflict mediator… so, you have to play multiple roles throughout the term. So, our core principle [when] writing the book became a cautionary tale, if you want… “Don’t try to do this unless you are willing to design and to implement that plan seriously”… because, in the end, poorly implemented teamwork is worse than not doing it at all. 

Sarah 

How would you define group or team learning in the context of post-secondary education? 

Ricardo 

Of course. Before I go to the question specifically, let me address what I see as an underlying issue within the question which is an issue of language. When we use “groups” [or] when we use “teams” specifically within business school, there is this myth of not all “groups” are “teams” and… you become a team because something magical happened within a group.  

So, there is quite a bit of research. But I think that what really matters is to ask ourselves, “Are we using teams to help students learn content or are we trying to develop their collaboration competencies?” These are fundamentally different goals.  

In the first case, what we would call “group learning,” if you want, you are just using collaboration as a method. Students work together to understand course concepts, solve problems, or complete projects. The team is the vehicle for learning the subject matter. In the second case, what you could call “team learning” or developing team competencies, collaboration itself is the learning outcome. You’re explicitly teaching students how to give feedback, navigate conflict, coordinate across differences, and build trust under pressure. These are skills that need direct instruction, practice, and assessment, just like any other competency development.  

Most instructors never make this distinction explicit. They say, I want students to learn the content and develop collaboration skills at the same time. But to design a course like that, you need different design choices, different assessments, and different time allocations. So, the confusion between method and outcome is a major reason why, in many courses, team-based activities end up failing. 

Jeremy 

You touched on this a little bit in your last answer in the middle. What competencies, again, would you say are specific to team learning as opposed to group learning? 

Ricardo 

Sure. And again, to clarify and to reinforce the point, when we talk here about team learning what we are talking about [is] how can we develop these skills, these competencies that the students need to work effectively with others. 

The five competencies that we describe and identify from the literature in the book are interpersonal communication, which is the ability to express ideas clearly, listen actively, and adapt your communication style to different team members. This goes way beyond being what some people call being a good communicator… but really adapting your communication to others [and] effectively communicating with others. The second one is collaborative problem solving. The third one [is] conflict resolution. The fourth one [is] collaborative planning. And the fifth one [is] goal setting and performance management. 

Unfortunately, these are not competencies that you can learn easily. So, developing these skills is a little bit different for each of us and, therefore, to do that in a large class or with many students that are different from each other is quite challenging for any of us. 

Sarah 

So, you’ve mentioned that in your book that you present a framework for teaching teamwork. Can you maybe walk us through what that framework looks like? 

Ricardo  

Sure. So, the framework that we are offering based on the literature is basically a three-stage framework, but with one particular type of work that you need to do throughout the entire course, creating and sustaining a learning environment for all students. Because what you need to do is to continuously work and ensure not only psychological safety for everyone, but also be inclusive and accessible so every student can participate [in] these activities meaningfully.  

And what that means at different stages throughout the term could be different. Maybe early on you have to, you know, include everyone, set up the rules [for] how we’re going to interact with each other and at different other points throughout the term, remind people that we need to maintain being inclusive and that we’re going to have conflict, but [consider] how we handle that conflict and what’s the ultimate goal of engaging in conflict with others for this type of work. So that’s why we call this “Stage zero” out of the three-stage process because it’s something that you need to do throughout the entire course. 

What we call stage one then is structuring and facilitating the creation and the evolution of the team. So here what you are supposed to do is thoughtfully create teams, help them establish norms, assign roles, guide them as they develop. You are not just randomly grouping students in the team and walking away. You are part of the process and you need to help them, coach them, facilitate issues as, early on… especially when we are just creating this group of strangers that [have] never worked together before, you are supposed to be there to work through the kinks of the evolution… early evolution of the team.  

The second stage is to give instruction [on] what the student [can] expect from teamwork theory and dynamics. And the idea is that… give students frameworks for them to make sense of what they would experience throughout the semester. They need to understand why teams succeed or fail, what causes conflict, how trust with their teammates develops. Without this conceptual foundation, we believe that they are just experiencing chaos without learning what’s going on at that point.  

And the third part is to create… and I think that this is the critical part for developing these competencies… is [being] engaged in what we call skill development cycles. And what this is let students practice these five competencies that we’ve discussed, receive assessment, get feedback, and give them the opportunity to reflect on the feedback they receive on whether they are actually developing these skills or not… but try to repeat that cycle throughout the term so [that] they have multiple times to make mistakes, but continue to give them practice, feedback, and reflections so they can actually develop.  

I think that the important thing here about this model is that it’s sequential, is intentional, and it requires sustained effort throughout the course. 

Jeremy 

Whether it’s somebody who doesn’t have the benefit of your research on this method or somebody who’s learning it for the first time, what do you imagine are the biggest or most common mistakes or challenges that they’re going to encounter when trying to do this? 

Ricardo 

Look, we all make mistakes, me included. It’s not that I figured this out and I’ve done it always perfectly or that I did it from the first time I taught the class. 

But I think that the first one is trying to avoid doing what we call “the sink-or-swim approach”. So, in this approach, instructors just form teams and assume students will figure it out on their own. But here [we see] what never works for developing competencies. Students don’t know what good collaboration looks like. They’ve never seen [an] effective conflict resolution model. They don’t have the framework for giving constructive feedback. Without coaching, facilitation, and active support from you or from any of us, they’ll just reinforce whatever dysfunctional pattern they already experienced in their life before. They might complete the project, whatever project you are giving them, but they won’t develop the competencies we want them to develop. So, that’s the typical, the most common mistake we’ve seen.  

The other mistake that I’ve seen many people make, and many talk about this explicitly, is using either tasks or assessments that are completely misaligned with the objectives that you want to achieve. For instance, if you give teams in your class, any type of project or task that they can easily split between them without needing to collaborate at all, without the need for integrating, then they will never integrate. They’ll split it and do the least they can do. And the same can be said about the assessment. If we only focus or assess the product and we don’t assess the process, the only thing they will care about is the product.  

And usually… because we want to sometimes, you know, minimize or be more efficient in our classes… only giving one grade for the whole team without any exploration of how each of the members have contributed to that task. That’s a problem too because we have the typical “free rider” problem. 

And the last one that I’ve seen less but is important still is that teams need time to develop. You cannot imagine or think that the students suddenly they come together and the second day they are working full-on. It takes time… it takes some weeks for this to work. Of course, it depends on how frequently you meet with them and how much you make them work, but it takes some time.   

So, the assessment, the feedback [and] the practices of competencies need to be in line with that natural development of the teams. And poor timing… asking them [for] too much, too soon, or too little at the end… that also can create problems in different classes. 

Sarah 

When you talk about conflict resolution, are there any tools or strategies that you leverage to help students navigate those? How do you give students feedback in those scenarios? 

Ricardo 

Well, how you manage the conflict needs to be team-by-team and, in some cases, team member-by-team member. That’s why it’s so important to have either resources in terms of time, other colleagues or TAs, or graduate students helping you be, you know, informed and following what’s going on inside each team… in the process of the team… to understand why this conflict is coming up, what type of conflict, and how we can deal with it. 

I’m, as you’ve seen before, a big fan of structure. So, I try to… early on when we talk about the typical things that happen to a team, we talk about conflict and the type of conflict and how to deal with it. So, whenever conflict arises and they haven’t figured out how to deal with it, I try to bring them back to the… theory, if you want, or the tools that we’ve discussed in classes saying, “Okay, let’s reflect together. Why is this happening? How can we address it? And let’s try to use some of the tools”. Like facilitating… instead of saying, “Oh, you are right [and] you are wrong.” It doesn’t matter who is right or wrong. It’s [about] how can we effectively cope with what happened and try to… based on more reflection, if you want… why each of us are coming to this conflict from this perspective [and] how we can try to handle it together.  

But again, the key for this to work is having you be close. If the conflict goes on for several weeks and you didn’t know… and remember, most students won’t bring conflict to you… It has to reach, you know, a peak. 

Jeremy 

You said something along the way that I experience a lot when I’m doing consults with instructors. “Don’t make the mistake of giving an assignment to a team and just making the structure of that assignment such that they can just carve it up into sections easily, everybody does their own little bit, and they never learn to work together.” So how do you design the assessment in a way that encourages them to work together on a common goal? 

Ricardo 

Well, of course, it depends on the type of class that you are teaching and the content and what you’re trying to achieve, of course, but I believe strongly on having assessment to process and to product.  

Process is critical from my point of view. To say, “Okay, this is the process that we should be using, and how is the process that you are actually using [going]?” For instance, they are arriving on time to the meetings? Are they doing the homework that they were supposed to be reading or completing certain tasks before the team meeting? Are they contributing to the discussion? Are they helping [with] the resolution of [a] certain conflict?  

And I do this multiple times during the term, because this keeps changing from task to task… and, you know, how the dynamics of the team [are] in week 6 could be quite different to the dynamic of the team in week 12. So, I run this type of feedback… 360-degree feedback… and trying to measure how things are working within the team and the process quite closely.  

And I try to sell this to the students saying, “Yes, I know that it’s a lot of work for you to do this, but in this way you get feedback on what’s working and what’s not working for each of you early on… not at the end of the term when there is nothing else that you can do.” If you have feedback early on from your teammates, you can actually change what you’re doing and what’s not working for you. And in fact, as part of that assignment and assessment, I asked them, “Okay, this is what they are telling you. What are you going to do for the next six weeks if this has been the key thing that hasn’t been working for you?” 

Sarah 

So, from your perspective, do you think that team learning works in all courses, and how can instructors know whether it should be included or not in their course? 

Ricardo 

Well, I think that you can already know that I don’t think we should use this type of approach in all courses. I think that it’s something that each instructor has to decide for herself or himself.  

So, I think that you can ask yourself three questions to decide whether this is really something that you should do. First is ask yourself, “Is developing competencies in working effectively with others actually appropriate for your course?” Is this appropriate for your course?  

You need to think about where your course sits within the program. Does your program even have this as a program learning goal? If not, why are we trying to do this alone? And, if we think that this is part of the program, then ask ourselves is our particular course the right place for the student to learn this or is there another course that is better positioned to do this? Are you the only place or the only course where they will develop these skills or are there several courses where they are building these skills progressively? The overarching goal here is that you cannot make these decisions in isolation, but you have to bring the program [in] as the key context to make this decision.  

If we forget the program for a moment, the second question I would say is, “Are these team competencies genuinely part of your course learning outcomes… or not?” If developing collaboration skills is not something that you are committed to teaching, assessing, supporting in this course, we shouldn’t pretend that this is the case. Not every course needs to develop these competencies and some courses have other legitimate priorities… and that’s perfectly fine.  

And the last one is, “Do you have the resources and capacity to do this well?” Remember that there are four stages that we discussed and all of them require significant time and energy. And if you’re already teaching other four courses with 100 students each and no support, trying to implement such a development might set you up for failure. I think that it’s much better to acknowledge that you have constraints and therefore you cannot do this [at] this time.  

Jeremy 

Would you then say that if a faculty member does have a passion for teaching this as part of their class and believes it is relevant to the learning objectives that they want to achieve, and they have the right amount of support or resources or they have a means to make that happen with their department, that there’s room for it in any subject? 

Ricardo 

I think so. I think so. Because you can try to integrate the learning of how to work with others as part of other topics.  But of course, this is not always the case. There are courses that are much more difficult to integrate and we all face the reality that we need certain, you know, course learning goals that we need to achieve… Let’s say in a philosophy course or in finance, accounting, math, that these are the priorities and not so much learning how to work with others. So, you know, I think that that’s something that each of us, the instructors, have to think a little bit more about. 

Sarah 

I think this is of interest, as Jeremy and I are both curriculum developers, so I’m kind of glad that you brought up the program-level discussion. I was just wondering if you have any advice or support you think that programs would need as they’re trying to look at developing teamwork across their curriculum. 

Ricardo 

Sure. I think that the first is just to come to the realization that achieving these goals is not easy. So, if we assume, “Okay, this is not easy!”, then the next step is saying, “Okay, how can we do it?” and then put together a plan at the program level so [that] it’s not the responsibility of one person in one semester in one class, and “This is what we’re going to do”.  

I think that the biggest issue is that in most universities we are so good at the transmission of knowledge, but this is not the transmission of knowledge! This is the developing of skills. Developing a skill is a completely different task, and acknowledging that doing this is different might open, you know, the creativity of the program and the instructors to say, “Okay, if we need to do this, we need to tackle this differently than assigning one person to teach this class… we need a team.”  

So, for instance, in our school now we even have a whole group that we call “the experiential learning team” that are people that are specialists in supporting faculty members… in helping them with team teaching and teamwork development within classes. So, if you accept… I’m not saying that this is the only way of doing it all the best… but if you accept that this is a complex issue and it’s not the typical thing that we do in every other class… that this is unique… then the type of resources and approaches that you can take are completely different than what you do in other classes. 

Sarah 

So, what have you learned from your own students about using a team learning framework? 

Ricardo 

I think I’ve learned a lot, but the most important thing I’ve learned is that students genuinely want our help to become effective team members and effective leaders in teams. They know these skills matter for their careers. They are hungry for guidance on how to navigate conflict, how to be better giving feedback [and] how to build trust with their classmates. When we offer real instruction and practice these types of competencies they lean in.  

The reality is that, you know, by the time they reach our courses. They already have experiences that have not been the best in teams. They’ve randomly been selected with a group of people that don’t pull their weight. They experience the divide-and-conquer chaos. They’ve had the instructor who said, “Work in teams.” and then disappear.  

So, they are both wanting help [and] deeply skeptical of whether this will work or not. So, we need to acknowledge this place where they are coming from, but also give them explain to them why this might work differently in this class. And I think that when you make them part of the learning process and you open the black box of why we are doing the things that we are doing in class, they are much more likely to bring all of themselves to the exercise and to commit to the type of work they need to do to do this. 

Jeremy 

I feel the temptation to just ask you if there’s one piece of advice that you would…. You see an instructor that’s going to be doing this for the first time, and they’re just getting started. What is the one piece of advice that you’d give that person about implementing team activities in their class. 

Ricardo 

[Laughing] So, 200 pages in a book and, “Give me one thing”.  

Sarah 

Exactly. 

Jeremy 

Just a starting point, a starting point. 

Ricardo 

That’s what we all hear… and this is the same thing that I would want to hear about any book, you know, [that] any of our colleagues end up developing.  

I think that, if there is one thing I would say that [is] coming from our book is, “Don’t do this if you don’t have the time, you don’t have the capacity, you don’t have the resources to do this well”, because if you do it the students will be frustrated, you will be frustrated with the process and with the complaints of the students and the things they do when they are frustrated, the administrators tend to be frustrated because they hear complaints from the students, and nobody wins. It seems like, “Oh, I’ll do this and I’ll save some time doing this”, and that in the end doesn’t work. It creates more problems for you.  

So, if there is one thing I think that comes from our book is… don’t do it unless you think about your context [and] you design the course in a way that, you know, fits the context that you’re facing. And then you yourself [should] have the capacity and the time and perhaps even do a little bit of professional development in how to play these roles of coach, facilitator [and] instructor all at the same time that not all of us have been even trained to do.  

So, when you have, you know, all these resources, you have the capacity, you train yourself, then you engage with this type of work much more meaningfully and with a much better chance of succeeding.  

Otherwise, you can use teams but use teams in a different way. Use teams in the other way that we discussed at the beginning. You can use them for the students to help each other to learn the content of your class, but not to do assignments together. You can use them to do other things, but not to achieve what we all dream of, which is [to] learn the content of the class and learn how to work together automatically by themselves. 

Sarah 

Thank you for the wonderful conversation, Dr. Flores. We learned a lot and we really appreciate your conversation today around team-based learning. 

Jeremy 

We hope the conversation that we have shared with you has proven interesting and helpful. To learn more about teaching and learning at UVic or about team competencies, be sure to visit our Teach Anywhere website at teachanywhere.uvic.ca or reach out to Dr. Flores at the Gustavson School of Business and stay tuned for more great episodes on teaching and learning practices. 

• Hosts: Sarah DeDecker & Jeremy Wintringer 
• Guest: Dr. Ricardo Flores 
• Technical Production: Sean Weeks & Jiexing Hu 
• Transcript Preparation: Sean Weeks & Jeremy Wintringer 

• Theme music: “freesound1.wav” by freezound5 (https://freesound.org/people/freezound5/sounds/588258/) and “sonically_sound.wav” by freezound5 (https://freesound.org/people/sonically_sound/sounds/624643/). Available for use under the CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication at freesound.org.