The Power of TEAMWORK in the Food Lab
“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” Henry Ford
This month, as quoted, I experimented with how to improve teamwork. With very helpful suggestion from my coach, Meenu Singh from Stanford University, and my learning partner, Dr. Chanansara Oranop na Ayutthaya from NIDA, I tried various strategies at 3 different stages to encourage the teamwork among 34 third-year undergraduate students in Food Quality Evaluation Laboratory. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, onsite laboratory periods were limited and students needed to plan and work efficiently as a team to complete more than 2 experiments within 3 hours.
Here are strategies I’ve tried in my experiments:
- About two weeks prior to the lab class, I used Zoom to explain about the lab experiments and let my students (in groups) plan their work and responsibilities together.
- At the beginning of the class, every student needed to turn in his/her planned workflow and responsibilities in the team.
- At the end of the class, everyone did team reflection using post-it notes & Google form and the team with efficient work (first team with complete data collection) got a prize.
During this class, I was very surprised that students were very determined to complete their lab work. Some of them said the challenge and prize made them feel that learning in the lab was fun and excited since it was like they were playing a game. Most students also thought that lab briefing and workflow were helpful for planning and managing in a team.
At the end of this experiment, what I have learned and would like to share is learning and encouragement of teamwork can be done in many ways. One of important things is that everyone in the team needs to be led and inspired to look at the same goal, so that they will try to complete it together.
Finally, I would like to thank my students, coach, learning partner, colleagues, and everyone for letting me learn and share this wonderful experience.
