Getting Your Student Teams Back on Track with Ensightful

It’s the end of the semester, you’re rushing to get grades submitted on time but students are unsatisfied with their group performance. Oftentimes, team issues remain unidentified until the last minute, adding to instructors’ pressure of teaching and finalizing grades on time. This is why it is important for instructors to detect these issues early in the semester.

A main component of Ensightful is to notify instructors of any concerning activities from students or teams. Ensightful does this by identifying teams that have slowed down compared to the rest of the class and students who have loosely contributed to their project. With this information, you can reduce the possibility of teams falling behind, as well as students attempting to free-ride.

Identify potential issues from the first weeks with Ensightful’s alerts.

With that in mind, if you are noticing potential issues from certain teams, here are some tips to help them get back on track.

1. Send a quick check-in message

When a team has been labeled ‘Off-track’ for over a week, it is recommended to reach out to them as soon as possible to avoid catching up later. Sometimes students just need a little boost — you can quickly message the team on Ensightful to get the conversation going and let them know you are there to help.

One check-in message goes a long way for team morale.

2. Schedule a check-in session with the team

Scheduling a quick meeting with an off-track team can encourage students to pick up the pace. During the meeting, you can surface potential issues by discussing alerts caught on Ensightful. Address the problems with your students and get them to come up with a solution on their own. New group arrangements should only be made if absolutely necessary.

Since instructors have access to students’ Kanban boards on Ensightful, you can go over the steps of creating and organizing tasks together. This will get your students into the project management mindset and avoid any confusion.

Go through the Kanban board with your students to ensure effective task organization.

Even a 30-minute check-in session could prevent group issues from snowballing into blow-ups and creating an unpleasant learning environment for students.

3. Prepare a team contract

If you have not implemented a team contract in your class, assign the off-track team to prepare one. The team contract should define agreed-upon expectations of roles and responsibilities. Let the team decide for themselves what their ground rules are for communication, participation, and quality of work. A mutual understanding of each other’s perspectives will build a more respectful environment, thus increasing group accountability.

If you have already introduced a team contract, review it with the students during the check-in session. You can advise them to update any inefficient contract terms, or create new ones to reflect existing issues. This is also a good time to remind students that the contract should be used to reflect on peer evaluation at the end of the semester.

You can download our free team contract template here.

Ultimately, group projects are meant to help students develop critical thinking skills and exchange knowledge. With some guidance from instructors, students can learn to better collaborate and transition those skills to their workplace.

We hope this blog has provided you with some helpful tips on using Ensightful to accelerate student team success. If you have any questions, feel free to leave your comments below, we’re always happy to help!