Team Learning Assistant

By
Sandra Deacon Carr
Ellen D. Herman
Sandra Zarotney Keldsen
Jeffrey G. Miller
Patricia Arkinstall Wakefield

Center for Team Learning
Boston University School of Management
595 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02215

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the support we received as we developed the Team Learning Assistant. The General Electric Fund has provided grants totaling more than $1 million to the Center for Team Learning, and some of this generous funding led to the Team Learning Assistant. GE executives provided inspiration and encouragement as well as funding, and we are grateful for their patient support.

Louis Lataif, Dean of the Boston University School of Management, was an inspirational champion of the team learning initiative in our School. He brought a practical understanding of the importance of teaming from his time as an executive at Ford Motor Company and raised our sights to help us see that we could do more than teach team skills—we could use teams to deepen learning as well.

A number of Boston University faculty contributed to the development of the six-step model used in the Team Learning Assistant and to the development of this workbook and the related software program. We have been fortunate to have a strong Organizational Behavior Department that has taken a leadership position on team learning from the start. In particular, Professor Bill Kahn was an early developer of the team learning concept. He implemented team learning in the School’s Executive MBA (EMBA) program with Professor Kathy Kram. Additionally, Professors Lloyd Baird and Tim Hall led the development and implementation of team learning courses in the undergraduate and MBA programs. And Davilyn Ferrin developed the first undergraduate team handbook for students. These faculty members helped us to understand many aspects of team learning, and we are grateful for their contributions to this project.

Colleagues from many other departments helped us to understand how to support the team learning efforts of faculty who were not specialists in team dynamics: Marketing Professor Dick Harmer developed the Team Checkpoint instrument, and Operations Management Professor Tom Dwyer developed the Let Me Introduce Myself instrument. As heads of the School’s Undergraduate Program, Operations Management Professors Peter Arnold and Bob Leone led the faculty in the development of an integrated team learning curriculum that begins in freshman year and takes the students through to their senior year, and contributed to the development of the feedback and evaluation instruments. Marketing Professor Jonathan Hibbard has been especially helpful in testing out and implementing the web-based components of the Team Learning Assistant in our junior year integrated core course, SM 323 Management as a System. Other faculty and doctoral students from the Strategy & Policy, Accounting, Finance, Organizational Behavior, and Information Systems Departments have participated in studies of the effectiveness of the team learning model and have made countless suggestions on how we can improve.

Thanks to everyone for your help.

-Sandra Deacon Carr