MAILING LISTS

Hi

Because we deal with big classes....we always do an online survey....followed by instructor team  creation....followed by classroom announcement

We done this on 20 plus courses with no major issues

We do explain our team formation criteria during the team announcements

When a small number of students complain that they want to form their own teams.....I point them at the Brickell team formation article...say that if they can provide me with a page long rebuttal to article advocating and SUPPORTING with evidence student created them are more effective...then I tell them I will allow them to self-select...no student has ever taken me up on it

Jim Sibley

Sorry for brief message -sent from my iPad

On 2010-08-29, at 10:13 AM, "Jennifer Imazeki" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> How important do you think it is to do the creation of teams in class?
> I'm asking because I was planning to create teams in class by having
> students line up according to different characteristics and then
> counting off. However, I want to make sure that both 'good' and 'bad'
> students are distributed across teams and I'm not sure how to do that
> without identifying the less-good students (in my mind, I am defining
> 'good' and 'bad' students by how well they did in the lower-division
> prereq classes, which are important preparation for this particular
> course). On the first day, I am having them fill out a short survey
> that I will use to gauge how to create the teams and I *could* just
> create the teams myself and walk in the second day and tell the
> students which team they are on. Does anyone think this would be a
> terrible thing to do?
> 
> thanks,
> Jennifer