A Faculty Guide to Successful Team Projects

Team and group projects can help students practice collaboration, leadership, communication, decision-making, and conflict management. However, putting students into groups does not automatically create a meaningful team experience.

Successful team projects require intentional assignment design, clear expectations, early planning, individual accountability, and a process for addressing problems while there is still time to solve them. Here’s what we’ve learned from experience in our own courses, backed by what the research says.

Begin with a genuine reason for using a team

Before turning an assignment into a group or team assignment, ask:

Does this work authentically require more than one person?

A strong team assignment is complex enough that students need to combine perspectives, knowledge, skills, or responsibilities. It creates meaningful interdependence rather than letting students split a project into individual pieces. Research consistently finds group work is best suited to complex, ill-defined problems with multiple valid solutions (Journal of Information Systems Education); without genuine interdependence, teams default to “divide and conquer,” which dilutes learning and breeds resentment (UC Irvine DTEI; ETSU Open Guide).

A quick test for whether an assignment deserves to be a group project:

• The project requires several areas of expertise.
• Students must evaluate competing perspectives or stakeholder interests.
• The scope is too large or complex for one person to complete well in the time available
• The work reflects an authentic business challenge normally handled by a team.
• Teamwork/collaboration itself is a learning objective of the course

Avoid converting an individual assignment into a group assignment primarily to reduce grading. In our experience, students recognize when an assignment does not truly require collaboration and they often experience the arrangement as unfair.

Connect the project to something real

Aligning group work with authentic, real-world tasks gives students a meaningful reason to invest (Queen’s University Centre for Teaching and Learning). Students in one study were notably more motivated when presenting to practicing professionals rather than only the instructor (UNL College of Business). Consider building in a real client, a genuine business problem, or an audience beyond the classroom such as practitioners, alumni, or an advisory board for the final presentation.

Wait until Week 2 to form groups

Students may still be adding, dropping, or changing sections during the first week. Creating teams too early can require repeated changes, leave late adding students out of important decisions, disrupt teams that have already begun working, and leave remaining students responsible for work originally assigned to someone who withdrew.

Week 1 can still be used productively. Explain the purpose of the team project, introduce expectations, and ask students to read all the team project descriptions and deliverables. Ask them to consider and share information in an initial pass/fail assignment, such as:

• Their schedules and availability
• Time zones and work obligations
• Relevant professional or technical experience
• Project interests (Ask them to read through the entire team deliverable including all assignments leading to the final deliverable, then share three ideas for the final deliverable plus two possible resources for each idea.)
• Previous experience working in teams
• Have them consider on their own how they want to fill out the team charter

Form the teams in Week 2 and have them begin their planning immediately.

Forming Teams

Consider keeping teams small. Free riding gets easier as group size grows (Fittipaldi, 2020; THE Campus).

Decide whether you or students will form the teams

Both approaches have tradeoffs.

Faculty assigned teams can be formed more quickly and ensure that every student has a team. The can also allow the instructor to consider scheduling constraints, experience, skills, or other relevant factors. Faculty assigned teams better mirror the workplace, where you rarely pick your collaborators (UC Irvine DTEI; Faculty Focus). Faculty assignment can result in a mismatch of personalities, but we’ve found a team charter can really help with that issue. Faculty assignment can add to the administrative load if you assign team based on work experience, time zone, available times to meet, etc. However, faculty assignment does not require complicated matching. Randomly assigned teams are sufficient for many projects.

Self-selected teams get off to a faster start because members already know each other, and students report more comfort and autonomy (Faculty Focus; Times Higher Education Campus). But self-selection tends to produce homogeneous friend groups, can create an uncomfortable “remainder problem” for students without connections in the class, and may lack the skill diversity the project needs (THE Campus). Notably, one comparative study found that while students in self-selected groups believed they produced higher-quality work, actual project grades did not differ between self-selected and instructor-formed groups (Faculty Focus).

In our experience, assigning students to random teams is the easiest, fairest, and most reliable approach. Some of our colleagues let students choose, and that can work too. Just make the choice deliberately, knowing what you’re trading off.

Make the first assignment a team charter

This is the single highest-impact practice we’ve found — and the research agrees. A semi-systematic review of 46 empirical studies on group projects identified team charters as one of the core evidence-based practices for successful teams (Fittipaldi, Universal Journal of Educational Research), and research at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln found that quality team charters had a strong positive association with performance on both team and individual assessments (UNL College of Business).

Here’s how we do it:

• The charter is due the first week teams exist (Week 2 of the course).
• Give teams examples, not a template. Share several sample team charters/contracts/agreements but don’t prescribe a format. The document needs to answer every question they’ll have about working together. The charter must address, but is not limited to:
  • Shared goals and standards — including the performance level or grade everyone is aiming for
  • Meetings and availability — days, times, and format, agreed to unanimously; everyone must be available to meet at the same time
  • Communication and collaboration technology, agreed to unanimously; no one may be excluded by a tool they can’t reasonably use
  • Roles, responsibilities, and internal deadlines
  • Decision-making, disagreements, and accountability — including what triggers contacting the instructor

All members affirm the final charter before submission.

Require students to report problems promptly

Faculty can help with a team problem only when they know it exists. Tell students at the start: if your team cannot agree on basic working arrangements, or a significant problem develops, contact the instructor immediately — do not wait until the end of the course. If a serious conflict ran all term and no one raised it until the final submission, the responsibility does not belong only to the person; every member had a duty to raise it while intervention was still possible. Teams should first use their charter’s conflict process for disagreements or challenges as stated in their charter.

Faculty involvement is appropriate when:

• The team cannot reach the unanimous agreements needed to begin working.
• A member repeatedly misses meetings or deadlines.
• Important decisions are being made without including all members.
• Communication has become disrespectful or unsafe.
• A member has effectively stopped participating.
• The team has attempted its conflict process without improvement.
• The disagreement could affect students’ grades or ability to complete the project.

Build individual accountability into the assignment

A team grade should not be the only evidence of an individual student’s learning or contribution.

Consider combining the shared product with one or more individual elements:

• An individual analysis or reflection
• Questions directed to individual students during a presentation
• Individual application of the project findings
• A short oral defense
• Documented responsibilities and contributions
• Confidential peer evaluations
• An individual quiz or follow-up assignment

Group functioning and individual contribution aren’t always visible in the final deliverable, so plan how you’ll evaluate both (CMU Eberly Center; Cornell Center for Teaching Innovation). Cornell recommends assessing both the group and its individual members, communicating the grading process in advance, and using confidential peer evaluation when it will influence grades. When peer evaluation scores affect grades, both team health and project quality improve (Frontiers in Education). To help peer evaluation scores be more valid, Ask students to rate observable behaviors such as preparation, reliability, follow-through.

A recommended course timeline

Before the course begins

• Confirm that the assignment genuinely requires a team.
• Define the learning objectives, final deliverables, and process deliverables.
• Decide how individual learning and contribution will be assessed.

Week 1

• Explain why the project requires collaboration.
• Describe how teams will be formed and graded.
• If you are forming the team: collect scheduling, availability, or skills information.
• Introduce the team charter.
• Avoid finalizing teams while enrollment is still changing.

Week 2

• Assign or approve the teams.
• Require an initial team meeting in person or using meeting technology all students have access to.
• Make the team charter the first team assignment.
• Require immediate contact if members cannot agree on meeting arrangements or technology.

During the project

• Use one or more process deliverables.
• Optional: Conduct a confidential midpoint team assessment.
• Intervene promptly when significant problems are reported.

At the end

• Assess the quality of the shared work.
• Assess individual learning and contribution.
• Review peer feedback as one source of evidence.
• Ask students to reflect on what they learned about working in a team, if relevant to your course goals.