Putting students into carefully constructed teams does not automatically make those teams effective.
Students bring different expectations about participation, communication, conflict, and what it means to contribute. Helping them understand how teams develop, build trust, and establish clear expectations from the beginning can give them a stronger foundation for working together.
Here are three practical ways educators can help TBL teams get started.
Tuckman’s Bruce Tuckman’s team development model provides useful language for understanding how teams develop: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and later, Adjourning.
During Forming, students are often polite and cautious while roles and expectations remain unclear. Storming begins when real differences emerge—around working styles, values, expectations, or how the task should be approached. As teams work through those differences, they can begin Norming, establishing shared ways of working that support greater collaboration. In Performing, members operate with greater trust, autonomy, shared purpose, and accountability.
Importantly, this process is not linear. New tasks, changes in membership, or damaged trust can send even an established team back through earlier stages. Performance may also dip during Storming and Norming because working through disagreement takes energy. Normalizing this in advance can prevent distress when the team’s performance drops.
For educators, the goal is not to diagnose every team precisely. It is to help students understand that friction is part of the work of becoming a team.
Trust is the foundation for effective team communication, and teams can be encouraged to accelerate the development of trust. Educators can create structured opportunities for students to get to know one another as a first step to trust.
For example, structured personal sharing invites team members to share something meaningful—such as an object that has meaning, a personal story—while others listen and reflect on the values they hear. This can be used during dedicated team development time, before teams move into more difficult conversations about how they are working together.
Teams can also practise gratitude and appreciation more intentionally by naming something specific they appreciate, acknowledging the effort involved, and explaining how that contribution helped.
Another option is reciprocal self-disclosure, where team members take turns responding to conversation prompts and gradually learn more about one another. This can be incorporated informally into existing interactions—for example, by discussing a few prompts over lunch or using one to start each team meeting.
These activities do not need to dominate valuable class time. They can be woven into team development activities or regular team interactions to create more opportunities for openness, understanding, and connection.
A Team Charter helps students make expectations explicit before those expectations become sources of tension.
The Team Charter includes team goals, meeting norms, communication, decision-making, conflict resolution, accountability, strengths and roles, process meetings, and when the charter should be reviewed.
Avoiding miscommunication is a good example of why this matters. In one team, some students interpreted unanswered group-chat messages as a lack of respect, while others simply did not have a habit of acknowledging every message. Neither expectation had been discussed.
A charter creates an opportunity to surface those assumptions.
Drafting the charter at the formation of a new team is not enough. Students in the Forming stage often cannot anticipate the problems they will encounter later on. Once they have worked together, students can return to the charter and ask:
What did we agree to? What is working? What needs to change?
A Team Charter can give students a structured way to agree on how they will communicate, make decisions, manage conflict, share responsibilities, and hold one another accountable. Download the Team Charter Template to adapt for your own TBL course—and revisit it as your teams develop.