Welcome to Teaming for Tomorrow, a site for educators to share and learn from each other about how to help students build and sustain dream teams. This work started out as a passion project for John Feland as he was teaching Design at one of the service academies. While the students were incredible, their ability to work together in teams was not. Building on collaborations with Larry Leifer at Stanford University, Dan Jensen at the Air Force Academy and the Center for Educational Excellence at The Air Force Academy, the content here has evolved over the years.
An update to this teamwork training content was sparked by a question Diane Brancazio of the MIT Edgerton Center posted on the K-12-fablabs google group. A former teacher now supporting other educators in hands-on design projects, she discovered that a major barrier to teachers leading collaborative design/research/maker projects is the students inability to work effectively in teams. How can students benefit from innovative tools, relevant content, or engaging challenges if they can’t work together? Did anyone know of practical training tools that a teachers and students could use to help build these skills? John responded to the request, offered his experience and tools, and a collaboration began.
John and Diane are leading an effort to update, upgrade and share new versions of this these tools with a K-12 focus. This simple yet powerful set of tools has been tested across USAFA, Stanford, Synaptics, Argus Insights, and most recently at The Nueva School. Rather than trying to follow rigid organizational structures for student teams or attempting to form “perfect” teams based on education assessments, this updated version brings together a mix of tools and frameworks to help students both understand themselves and their team members as they work towards building incredible teams to make the world a better place.
Our first set of workshops will be offered on 17 Aug at 8AM PDT. In this hat trick of workshops, teachers will experience not only what their students will but also will be coached on how to leverage these tools and frameworks in their own classrooms. Learn more and register on this page.