Excerpt
Student Snapshot
Ms. Brown is late once again to Walter's team meeting — this time by 20 minutes — and the meeting is almost over. Ms. Hill reacts, "How do you expect us to work together if you are never here on time?" "You always blame me," Ms. Brown retorts and stomps out of the room in tears. To make matters worse, Walter's mom refuses to sign his IEP, even after the lengthy process his teachers used to involve her. Team members are disappointed and angry. "What does she want anyway? We put everything in his program!" "She doesn't know how good that IEP is!"
Even good teams experience laspes in trust, negative stereotyping, miscommunication, and impasse. No team can operate without having some internal conflict. A team's members, experiences, and outcomes are dynamic and changing, as is a team's relationship with its supporting school environment. This chapter addresses the characteristics of strong and effective teams: establishing team trust, promoting accurate and unambiguous communication, being sensitive to diversity and avoiding stereotyping, fostering positive staff-family interactions, and addressing disagreement. These interrelated characteristics contribute to the interpersonal relationships and communication among team members, both of which are essential for creative and cooperative work conditions. Inevitably, even when these characteristics are in place, most teams periodically experience problem behavior from one or more team members and nonconstructive conflict within the group. The last section of this chapter discusses strategies for addressing these threats to team effectiveness.
ESTABLISHING TEAM TRUST
Establishing trust among team members is not a simple process; it requires both trusting others and being trustworthy (Johnson & Johnson). When each team member trusts his or her fellow team members, several qualities are realized:
- Interdependency — Team outcomes depend on others as well as on oneself.
- Shared risk — Team outcomes can be good or bad and can result in gains or losses for oneself, the student, and/or the team.
- Confidence — Team outcomes will be good and will yield benefits (Deutsch, 1962).
Interdependency, for example, involves a willingness on the part of each team member to contribute to the achievement of team goals by 1) sharing their resources for group gain (e.g., talents, materials, ideas, time, energy), 2) giving help to others (e.g., modeling skills, volunteering for tasks in team action plans), 3) receiving help from each other (e.g., learning from one another's demonstrations; seeking and listening to the viewpoints, advice, or information of other team members), and 4) dividing the team's work. These interdependent behaviors are associated with team members' open expression of ideas, feelings, reactions, opinions, and information (Johnson & Johnson, 2000).
Student Snapshot
Ms. Wilson wonders whether there will be harmful or beneficial outcomes if she confesses her frustrations with Sam to her teammates: "As Sam's teacher in English 9, I am a member of Sam's team. I contributed to the design of his support plans, which were drawn up in August. However, after 2 months of using these plans, I'm very frustrated by the way in which other students seem to push his buttons, which almost always causes him to get upset; then I get upset and off task. Co-teaching with Ms. Elliott is working well; however, she seems much more able to ignore these interactions, to let them just go, or to prompt him (like we agreed in the action plan) to say things such as, 'get off my back' or, 'lay off.' I get tense and fearful that Sam will explode, I won't know what to do, and the whole class will fall apart. I've decided to say something, even though I'm concerned that the problem might really be my problem, but I worry: If