2.5 Team training
The team training sessions were based on (Rasmussen et al., 2011).
Briefly each session took around 30 minutes and were spread out at key
times through semester. The first activity happened in week 2 when the
students had just been allocated to a group and was an icebreaker,
focused on expectations of team members, personality types and role/task
allocation. Session 2 was based around negotiation and problem solving
and used a negotiation activity. The third session had the students
reflect on their behaviour in the team and that of the team as a whole
(in-line with the expectations discussed in Session 1). As this third
session occurred one week after moving to online teaching, the session
was also used to think ahead about plans or behaviours that may need to
change to overcome collaborating in isolation. The final session
occurred in the last class before submission (via video call during
lockdown) and had the students negotiate contributions to the final
documentary product. Each session was available to the students from
week 2 in their Microsoft Team environment as a PDF and with the text
copied into the Collaboration Space in the Class Notebooks so they could
answer questions and make notes. The student and teacher guidelines are
available at https://www.arlab.co.uk/education-research.html
(Supplementary Material 3). For a visual representation of the semester
plan and when interruptions occurred, please see Figure 4.