Team Formation Tips for Smooth Sailing into the New School Year!

If you use cooperative learning in your classroom, you might have questions about the most effective way to form teams and when you should begin to seat your students in teams.

Here are some tips that worked well for me. You can find a more comprehensive explanation and answers to many more questions about team formation on my Team Formation Tips page.

• Optimal Team Size – Teams of 4 are by far the best size because you can easily divide them into 2 sets of pairs for partner work. Also, in a team of three, one student tends to feel left out, and teams that have more than four students tend to get off task easily.
• Team Composition – As much as possible, I formed teams with students of mixed ability and from different ethnic backgrounds. I wanted my students to learn to appreciate others who were not like themselves, and to be exposed to different types of thinking and values. The best way to do that was to assign them to mixed teams rather than letting them choose their teams.
• Desk Arrangement – I loved using the desk arrangement shown in the illustration above. I called it the T-Table arrangement, with the two students at the top of the “T” facing the front of the room while the other two are facing each other. You can find other team seating arrangements on my Seating Options page.
• When to Start – I always started my students in teams right from the first day because I wanted them to learn that this is how we operate. Cooperative learning wasn’t just for special activities, and they needed to learn now to get along right from the start.
• Mix ‘Em Up the First Three Days – I created new teams every day for the first three days so that my kids would get to know everyone and so I could observe them as they worked together. Each morning after they were reseated, we started the day with a teambuilder like Team Talk or Team Interview. You’ll find these strategies and more on my Caring Classrooms page on Teaching Resources. After the first three days, I was ready to create more permanent teams that lasted a month or more.

I hope these team formation tips will help you sail into the new school year!