Christie Stewart: Creating a Culture of Resilience

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When Dr. Christie Stewart began her year-long pilot of APPH 1802, “Thriving, Not Just Surviving: Strategies for Health and Resilience,” she did not anticipate just how immediately relevant the topic of resilience would prove. Stewart, who holds a PhD in higher education leadership, centers her research and teaching on the development of communities to support well-being. In her current role as a faculty member in the School of Biological Sciences, she teaches the wellness requirement, which incorporates pillars of health and well-being including physical activity, nutrition, sleep, stress management, coping, and resilience.

Stewart’s mission to create a culture of resilience at Georgia Tech took a turn during a week-long training workshop. Preparing her class, Stewart wondered, “how can we continue to support our students’ well-being? How can we integrate the practical aspect of self-care? How do we best have students look at the different dimensions of well-being and evaluate where they are?” As she was introduced to the CliftonStrengths framework, she was intrigued by the potential of team dynamics for pursuing these questions. Through conversations with Caroline Dotts, associate director of healthy lifestyle programs at the Campus Recreation Center (CRC) and a member of the Effective Team Dynamics Initiative’s leadership team, Stewart developed a plan to teach the building of effective teams using a positive, strengths-centered approach.

Stewart’s year-long honors pilot class, co-taught with Lesley Baradel, took a two-pronged approach: learning about personal and team-based strengths and using “crucial conversations” to make differences, and even conflicts, productive. Students identified their own coping styles and strengths, learning to transform stress into positive challenges. As one student put it, “My learner strength helps me be very resilient. Anything in life is an opportunity to learn, and gathering knowledge and learning from problems helps me look at problems as challenges to learn and improve from. This way, I’m better prepared the next time a similar problem comes around.”

For Stewart, the concept of resilience is important especially for students who tend toward perfectionism and have deep anxieties about failure. Resilience provides a productive way for students to use stress, obstacles, and failure to come back stronger. In class, students are taught to use failure to set future goals based on personal values and purpose.

By the time her spring semester final exam rolled around, students were more than ready to observe and describe the strengths they used to be resilient. Stewart reports that students responded overwhelmingly in positive terms: being grateful, remaining connected, finding support, and being supported by others topped the list of strategies they learned from their resilience training.

Stewart’s use of CliftonStrengths extends beyond the classroom. She learned that her top five talent themes were “achiever, deliberative, futuristic, analytical, and significance.” In her work on APPH 1802, she found herself especially tapping into the “futuristic” and “analytical” themes as she ran her pilot and put together a course proposal. Stewart describes herself as “inspired by a vision of the future,” and as being deeply motivated by “looking for rationales or reasons for why we do what we do” – both strengths that are crucial to putting together a successful pilot course.

Completing the course, which strongly features interpersonal skills, in a remote learning environment was never part of Stewart’s original plan, but she has no regrets about the timing of her pilot. She hopes the time spent working through questions of personal purpose and meaning, team skills, adapting to challenges, and integrating setbacks into an overall growth plan will continue to benefit students in an uncertain time.

YouTube Video Series: How Do We Team?

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Whether you’re preparing for an online summer course or working on an extracurricular team project, chances are you’ll be collaborating remotely. With the shift to online courses and meetings, it’s more important than ever for teams to understand and appreciate each other’s strengths.

We recently launched a series of videos adapted from our curricular materials with tips on strengthening online team dynamics. On our new YouTube channel, ETD Director Dr. Mary Lynn Realff shares tips on encouraging contributions so your team can thrive even while working remotely.

If your teammates aren’t doing what you expect them to do, they might be unaware of their tasks or responsibilities, or they might not have the necessary skills. It’s also possible that they’re unwilling to move the project forward because they don’t agree with a decision that was made. They might not believe their task is essential to the project, or they might be feeling a lack of accountability. Once you understand the issue, you can find a solution together.

Our “How do we team?” playlist features 1-minute videos about clarifying deliverables, building skills, developing consensus, discussing impact, and upholding integrity. These tips are intended to support faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students in positively reshaping their online teamwork experiences.

Be sure to subscribe to our channel to get updates on new videos! You can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

And don’t hesitate to contact us for teaching and learning support! To request curricular materials on strengths and teamwork for your online course, email etd@gatech.edu.

Susan Cozzens: Creating Professional Development Opportunities for Graduate Students

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“Teams are more innovative when they work together,” Dr. Susan Cozzens says. “They’re more creative if they can put their minds together – you really come up with something that’s different.” As Vice Provost for Graduate Education at Georgia Tech, Cozzens knew that STEM graduate students did most of their research in teams with faculty advisors. She also knew that team dynamics impact research outcomes. Yet as she reviewed the literature in Science of Team Science, she realized that the field focused only on professional team science, with very little research on grad students’ teamwork experiences: “there’s just a different set of dynamics which I did not hear this field talking about.” So she is leading the charge to apply research on team science to graduate student professional development. “Because I’ve spent five years being vitally concerned with graduate students, the experience they were having on campus, and their preparation for later professional life, I was led to look for materials in the Science of Team Science to help them, and it just wasn’t there,” Cozzens explains. “So we had a nice opening to do some creative things.”

When a member of Dr. Cozzens’ staff began drafting an NSF proposal to develop teamwork skills among graduate students, working with the Effective Team Dynamics initiative was a natural fit, and Dr. Mary Lynn Realff a key contributor. The funded project has used the tools Dr. Realff developed for undergrads as well as the Science of Team Science literature to produce materials specific to grad students. A key difference between the undergraduate ETD curriculum and the graduate team science curriculum is incorporating more research literature. “Graduate students love the fact that there’s quantitative analysis out there,” Cozzens says. “They love the fact that it’s coming from the literature because they’re here for research training.” And grad students’ multi-year projects necessitate longer-term teamwork strategies: while undergrads have one-semester team projects, grad students work with the same team for four to five years.

Leading the NSF-IGE grant-funded project “Integrating Team Science into the STEM Graduate Training Experience,” Dr. Cozzens has helped facilitate trainings and evaluated student feedback. She and her colleagues developed and assessed a one-day workshop format, and they are currently experimenting with other formats. Cozzens explains that Dr. Realff and Dr. Kata Dósa took the lead on designing the materials, and Dr. Meltem Alemdar and Christopher Cappelli led the assessment. Through the process of designing, testing, and revising curricular materials, the team is honing best practices for training graduate students in teamwork skills. To better understand graduate students’ perspectives and experiences, Cozzens initially arranged focus groups with Georgia Tech students from various disciplines. She learned that while grad students are generally underprepared for teamwork, they often end up in informal leadership roles in teams with hands-off advisors. Assessment focus groups have helped the IGE team learn that grad students want to practice having crucial conversations with mentors, and that the one-day workshop should give participants portable tools and activities to incorporate in the ongoing teamwork process. Learn more about the early stages of the project here, and view the project site for the current iC⚙GS: Interdisciplinary Collaboration for Graduate Students curriculum here.

Through doing this research, the IGE team has found that communication and conflict management are key skills for grad students to learn. “Communication is really crucial,” Cozzens notes. “You really have to be talking to people, you have to be thinking about what the issues are, and willing to articulate them.” To establish a strong foundation for long-term projects, the iC⚙GS curriculum helps teams practice horizontal conflict management strategies, so they can address issues with each other rather than going to their faculty advisors. To avoid potential future conflicts, teams are encouraged to write a charter outlining co-authorship agreements and ground rules around data archiving. Because teams tend to have rolling membership (with advanced students graduating and new students joining, and postdocs coming and going), it is important to revisit the charter and rules each year: each team’s foundation should also be adaptable so that new members feel they have a voice. One of the most important tools, Cozzens says, is the “crucial conversations” module, adapted from the undergrad ETD module, which facilitates mock discussion between grad students and advisors. This module has been “riveting” for grad students, as it helps them navigate hierarchies and initiate discussion with the faculty advisors who play a key role in their careers. Teamwork training for grad students, Cozzens notes, has mutual benefits: promoting strong student teams also helps untenured junior faculty’s careers because it strengthens research outcomes with innovation and creativity.

As a trailblazer in applying Science of Team Science research to graduate education, Cozzens presented the group’s experience at the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools this past December – “a big gathering of Graduate School Deans and staff members from all kinds of institutions across the country, and some internationally.” On a panel of three universities (Georgia Tech, University of Florida, and William & Mary), Cozzens presented what the investigators learned from focus groups about the diversity of team experiences, and discussed how she and her team changed the workshop content and revised materials in response to assessment. She emphasized the importance of grounding training methods in research, teaching skills to talk to advisors, and developing independent tools to use with teams. (View the panel’s presentation slides here.) This innovative research is poised to make a big impact in the field: “The people from Council of Graduate Schools had never heard of the research field, the Science of Team Science, so we’re making a connection there. I think it’s going to start branching out from there quite rapidly.” With these new cross-disciplinary connections, Cozzens and her colleagues are paving the way for future research to further strengthen grad students’ professional development. “The Science of Team Science people had not been thinking about graduate students, and the Graduate School community hadn’t been thinking about this body of knowledge about teamwork, and so we’re putting it together in a distinctive way,” Cozzens says. “I guess we’re almost pioneers.”

Her strengths in evidence-oriented analysis, big picture thinking, and activist persistence inform Dr. Susan Cozzens’ approach to the project work. Advocating on key issues energizes her, and she always strives to move forward from the status quo. She brings her best self to a team by connecting people with resources, helping the group formulate issues, and keeping things moving. To successfully navigate team dynamics, she makes sure the group can get together face-to-face, and emphasizes active listening. She knows and respects her collaborators’ strengths and working styles, and she is careful not to overwhelm others with her attention to detail and activist persistence. She is “fearless about relationships” and is “willing to speak up” about key issues – valuable skills she brings to any team. Her strength in bold, clear communication has certainly led to excellent outcomes for the project!

Juliana Alfonso: An Alumna MVP of Team Dynamics Training

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Juliana Alfonso, like many seniors, fervently looked forward to her graduation date at the end of the summer of 2019. Leaving Georgia Tech was not an unmixed pleasure for the Neuroscience B.S., however. Juliana will miss her friends on campus, her faculty mentors, and, of course, the delicious and affordable cafeteria food (ok, well maybe not that last one). One of the most difficult things to leave behind has been her involvement in team training, a topic in which she’s developed considerable expertise over the last three years.

Since 2016, Juliana has been deeply involved in the Effective Team Dynamics (ETD) initiative, a program funded by a large Strategy Plan Advisory Group grant in 2015. Juliana describes herself as the “student assistant” of Mary Lynn Realff, the head of the ETD initiative, but this title doesn’t begin to capture the extent of her involvement. From scheduling meetings, to facilitating workshops, to gathering curriculum resources, her organizational skills and calm, cheerful presence have deeply informed the image and impact of ETD across Georgia Tech’s campus and beyond.

Juliana explains her multifaceted role within the initiative through the analogy of soccer – she is ETD’s mid-fielder because “the mid-fielder is critical to get the ball from one side of the field to the other so that forwards can score. The mid-fielders score the goals sometimes and play defense sometimes, but mostly their job is to transfer the ball from the defenders to the forwards.” Juliana’s role was to facilitate the crucial transfer of the ideas generated in brainstorming sessions to reality. Her expertise in implementation means that she has left her mark on almost everything ETD has done in the past three years. Now in its fourth year, ETD has involved over 800 faculty members and 5000 students across all six of Georgia Tech’s academic units.

One of Juliana’s favorite roles has been that of workshop facilitator. Using curriculum developed in-house at Georgia Tech and built on tools such as CliftonStrengths and the Johari Window, she has led her fellow students from first-year composition to senior design classes in identifying their strengths and becoming more effective team members. In addition to a new skillset, she teaches them her underlying philosophy: to solve a problem, teammates need a shared language to notice and define as many elements of the problem as possible, and they need to lean on the expertise and strengths of other team members to find solutions.

She summarized her experience in these words:

“I’ve learned that people of all backgrounds and beliefs can come together to work towards a common goal and be very successful if they take the time to ‘speak the same language’ and define expectations at the outset.”

Goodbye and best of luck to you, Juliana!

Figuring Out Positive Team Dynamics

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Have you ever been a part of a conversation with a student that went something like this?

Student: I’m having a lot of trouble completing this team project.

Professor*: How can I help? Is the material too difficult? Is there something about the project you don’t understand?

Student: Oh, no, I understand the project and what we are supposed to do. It’s our team. One of our team members just isn’t showing up; they haven’t handed in any of the work so far and aren’t responding to emails. Another is such a perfectionist that their feedback is super harsh and really discourages the rest of us. I really like this class and want to do well, but I just don’t know what to do.

Professor: I’m very sorry to hear that, but you all are going to have to figure out how to make this work. You are going to have to work in teams for the rest of your career, so this is an important experience to help you learn how to handle these situations.

*You could easily substitute “PI” or “Manager” here.

The frustration on both sides of this conversation is clear. The student needs help; they are expressing a clear desire to learn more about how to manage the complex social interactions of working in a team. Meanwhile, the professor has worked carefully to design a course aimed at helping students achieve mastery in content in a specific area of their expertise and wants to ensure that content is the focus of their instruction. However, just as an architecture professor would never say “You’ve walked in a building, so figure out how to build one,” or a business professor would never say “you’ve shopped in a store so figure out how to run one,” the idea that a professor would limit instruction in a subject as complex and difficult as managing team dynamics to “figure it out” limits both the student and the faculty member. Faced with this language, students often feel the faculty member is dismissing their concerns and does not care.

Dr.Mary Lynn Realff noted that this frustration on both sides was where her inspiration for this initiative came from.

“[Difficult team experiences were] keeping students from learning. That was really the thing. They wanted to be in senior design. They wanted to do a good design project and this was keeping them from actually completing their project at a level where they could be proud of it. Instead, they were mired in all this negative team dynamics stuff where they didn’t know how to handle it and their professors couldn’t help them handle it.”

The Effective Team Dynamics initiative was born out of conversations like this one, with the intention of reshaping the team dynamics learning experience in a positive and intentional way.

As teachers, we want our students to succeed; we care about them and want them to thrive. We strive to design courses, present material, create assignments, and build activities so that students can learn the necessary skills and information necessary for them to succeed in the workplace and change the world for the better. For many of us, this includes designing projects modeled on “real world” experience, where students work in teams to solve problems, conduct experiments, or create products for a client beyond what they could do on their own. However, while we regularly work to ensure that students are provided with the best possible resources for content instruction, often, teaching teamwork skills falls by the wayside. ETD is all about considering team work and team dynamics a similar area of instruction that can, and should, be taught. ETD believes that a conscious and reflective approach to learning what you bring to a team and how you work best in teams can improve team dynamics for students, faculty, and staff both in and out of the classroom.

Dr. Realff’s mission to improve her own teaching by learning how to help students negotiate the vital task of working with others, led to a broader goal: to develop a cohesive curriculum focused on developing team work skills that other faculty members at Georgia Tech could deploy in their own classrooms, labs, and mentoring relationships. Initially funded as part of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Plan Advisory Group 4 year grant for over $200,000, ETD has created a series of student-centered instructional modules, facilitated classroom sessions, and homework activities aimed at improving students’ overall teamwork experiences. ETD also identified and compiled useful activities into a Faculty Tool Kit, designed to help faculty members who regularly work with student teams to assess and address common concerns in teams. Now in its 4th year, ETD has involved 500 faculty and staff members throughout all six colleges of the Georgia Tech community, helped 5000 undergraduate and graduate students identify and leverage their CliftonStrengths in productive team conversations, and designed 3 facilitated sessions and 6 curriculum units to be deployed at strategic “Touchpoints” throughout a Georgia Tech student’s career at the Institute.

The Effective Team Dynamics Initiative is based on research-driven methods of improving team dynamics, focusing on reflective evaluation of a students’ own habits, skills, knowledge, and abilities as well as the requirements of specific assignments, and the unique dynamics present in each new team. Using the language of CliftonStrengths, ETD helps students identify their patterns of thought and behavior, name and build on their strengths, identify the diverse strengths of any team, and interpret behaviors of their team members in productive ways. By teaching both faculty and students how to approach defining expectations within a team, how to have “Crucial Conversations” when issues arise within a group, and how to give useful feedback on teamwork skills, ETD provides supportive structure and a set of tools that can help students “figure out” their individualized best approach to working in teams based on evidence and research-driven methods.