Teaching Kids to Work in Teams

One evening at the dinner table, when my son Noah was in sixth grade, we were discussing his day. “How’s your science project going?” I asked. His class was learning the scientific method. Working in groups of three, the students were building a rocket, developing hypotheses about how high and fast it would go, and learning to collect and analyze data. That day, the groups launched their rockets.

“Not good,” Noah replied. When I asked what happened, he explained that his group wasn’t able to agree on a hypothesis to test, which meant that they couldn’t agree on what data to collect or analyze, so they didn’t have anything to write up. When I asked if his group had received any help from the teacher, he told me that they received help on the scientific method, but nothing to help his group work together.

Later that year, I met with Noah’s team of teachers (yes, they called themselves a team). I shared my son’s story and proposed a way to teach teachers to teach students how to work in teams. They were interested, but the timing didn’t work out. My son is now in college and still he has never been taught how to work in teams. If it weren’t for the advice he gets from my wife and me, he would have had to learn this entirely on his own.

Fast forward. When our clients learn about the Mutual Learning approach, they often say something like, “I wish I had learned these skills when I was in school. It would have made it much easier.”

At the heart of working in teams is being able to learn from and with others.

At some point in our lives, our primary sources of learning shift. We learn less from teachers and books and more from others with whom we work. We find ourselves first in school rooms and later in conference rooms, in which no one knows everything, everyone has some pieces of the puzzle, and we must work together to solve it. There is no person or book with “the answer.” Our success, the success of our teams, and later our organizations, depends on our ability to work and learn together.

And yet, few students formally learn this critical set of skills.

Think about your education. Were you taught how to work in teams? If you have children, were they taught this in school? If you are like most people, both answers are “no.” There is a double challenge here, one that will be familiar to many of you. Working well in teams doesn’t just require a new set of skills; it usually requires a different mindset.

Originally published September 2008