Planning for Difference: Preparing Students to Create Flexible and Elaborated Team Charters that Can Adapt to Support Diverse Teams

Abstract

Background: A robust body of research supports the use of team charters to purposefully create a team culture with shared norms and expectations. However, student teams often treat this requirement as busywork and fail to invest the effort needed to create team charters that prepare the team to adapt for obstacles that they may encounter. Situating the case: Teams that do not engage in effective planning for their collaborations are likely to encounter a range of problems including slackers, domineering teammates, curtailed learning opportunities, and general exclusion from the project work—problems that are often exacerbated on diverse teams and that disproportionately affect marginalized populations. About the case: We created three online modules that help students uncover their own tacit expectations for teamwork, share and merge these expectations, and then construct a team charter and task schedules with their teammates. Methods: We used a quasiexperimental design comparing team charters from control and experimental groups to understand how our modules affected students’ charters at a university with a highly international population. Results: Analyses revealed that control group charters tended to invoke universal team norms and assign punishments for failing to uphold those norms. By contrast, experimental group charters were more flexible, acknowledged competing priorities, evidenced greater planning, and articulated processes that could accommodate individual goals, values, and constraints. Conclusions: Charters created after the modules showed more accommodation of difference; however, more research needs to be done to determine whether the more flexible and elaborated charters improve team behaviors.