Teachers equipped with MGB, an evidence-based formative assessment software, can cultivate students’ teamwork competencies through four crucial dimensions.

MGB for Nurturing Teamwork Competencies in Learners

How MGB Can Help Your Students

• Key Benefits & Features

  • MGB is an intervention stemming from a formative learning analytics pedagogy, focusing on four teamwork dimensions and housed on a web-based software.

  • It can help to sensitize students to their personal teamwork competencies, becoming more purposeful in learning the competencies in team settings.

  • It helps teachers to better understand their students’ teamwork behaviours, allowing teachers to Systematically nurture these behaviours in students.

  • It equips teachers with tools (i.e., MGB platform) to scaffold the teaching and learning of teamwork competencies.

Why MGB?

How Does MGB Work?

What’s the Team and Self Diagnostic Learning (TSDL) Framework?

Undergirding MGB is the TSDL framework – a pedagogical approach that uses formative learning analytics to nurture students’ teamwork competencies.

Four Stages of the TSDL model

Stage 1: Team-Based Concrete Experiences

To activate teamwork behaviours, students are situated in a team setting with tangible team outcomes. Collaborative learning is supported by MGB web-based software:

• Lesson pages where teachers provide resources for the team task

• MGB chat – a platform for students’ online discussion

Stage 2: Self and Team Awareness Building

Through the rating function on MGB, students rate themselves and team members and provide peer comments anonymously based on their recent teamwork experiences.

The student dashboard displays students’ peer comments as well as aggregates ratings into Personal and Team Micro-Profiles on four teamwork dimensions to raise students’ awareness of their personal and team’s teamwork competencies.

The four teamwork competency dimensions are

• Coordination – organizing team activities to complete a task on time
• Mutual Performance Monitoring – checking and tracking the performance of team members
• Constructive Conflict – dealing with differences in interpretation between team members through discussion and clarification

• Team Emotional Support – supporting team members emotionally and psychologically

Stage 3: Self and Team Reflection and Sense Making

Guided by MGB’s reflection space, students reflect on the information acquired from their personal and team micro-profiles, first individually and then as a team. Students are then encouraged to take actionable steps to improve on future-oriented team behaviors.

Stage 4: Team and Self-Growth and Change

In this stage, students are encouraged to continue their team-based project work through MGB where a Teamwork Steps Status Check function is provided to help students monitor their progress on the steps they have set individually and as a team. This emphasizes the regulation of the individual and the team on their behaviors, which are key mechanisms for changing attitudes and actions.

Evidence from MGB research

How did students respond?

• Students’ peer-rated teamwork competency dimensions increased over the course of the intervention.
• Many students reflected that MGB was effective in helping them learn more about and improve their personal teamwork competencies. This is as the peer feedback visualization for reflection led to better introspective processes for learning about their own personal teamwork competencies.

• Students also commented that as they monitored their progress on goals over time, they find themselves to be more metacognitively aware of their teamwork tendencies in terms of understanding their current perceptions and/or intentions for improvement.

In addition, Teachers who Participated in the Research Noted:

• MGB can support teachers’ professional competencies in teaching and facilitating group activities in terms of:

  • Design and delivery of group-based collaborative inquiry tasks

  • Tracking of student progress and their teamwork competencies for any necessary follow-up actions

• Teachers stated that MGB is effective in helping both teachers and students:

  • Develop a better understanding of the concept of teamwork and the competencies dimensions involved when working in a team

  • Heightening teachers’ insights and understanding of their students

  • Understanding team dynamics of how and why students behave in certain ways

Teachers also shared that their role and involvement in research has expanded as a teacher, facilitator, co-designer of learning experiences and environments and practitioner researcher through this project.

Overall, there is a general sense of fulfilment and achievement as teachers grow in their professional competencies to facilitate and teach teamwork competencies. As teachers see meaning in teaching teamwork competencies in their classes, they are convinced of its place in the education of their students.

How Can Teachers Get Started?

Related Links

Further Readings

Research Projects

Research Team

Acknowledgments