Hello Jennifer and list: My take on this issue: I think that transparency for team formation is very important for the principle of fairness; that is, students ought to be confident that the teams have been created in a balanced way such that no one team will have an inherent advantage over the other. However, I share the concern about the "counting-off line," even if the line is determined according to a questionnaire that spreads assets (such as experience and leadership) rather than grades (and I never use grades). A line still has a head and a tail, and students "feel" it. Instead, I simply collect the index cards that the students have used to calculate their assets according to my questionnaire, and then I tell them that I am going to distribute these evenly and explain how. I do this on the desk at the front of the room, and it takes me no longer than 10 minutes for a class of, say 60. I have never had a complaint or challenge. Regards, Brent MacLaine Brent MacLaine, Ph.D. Professor and Chair Department of English University of Prince Edward Island 550 University Avenue Charlottetown PE Canada C1A 4P3 Office: 902-566-0955 Fax: 902-566-0363 >>> Jennifer Imazeki <[log in to unmask]> 29/08/2010 2:10 PM >>> 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