UBC Mailing Lists 17.0 - TEAMLEARNING-L Archives

After using TBL in Intro Psych sections ranging from 80-140 students for the last 10 years, I’ve encountered a new situation that I wanted to share with the group. We finished our first major team activity in class on Wednesday. That evening, I received the following message from one of my students:

Good Evening Dr. Madson,

I wanted to make you aware of an uncomfortable incident that happened to me during today's class. In my group I am the only girl, I am fine with that but today one of my group members made me feel very uncomfortable and did something I see as very disrespectful. While working on our paper ads we were using some markers and I had one that I was using and I had placed it in between my legs because it kept rolling all over my little desk. Following that one of my group members XXXXXXX turned around and tried reaching for it with out even announcing he needed the marker or addressing to me he wanted it. As his hand was reaching toward that area I stopped him and let him know that he needed to ask for it instead of trying to grab from that area which he has no business trying to go near. He tried to apologize but the whole situation made me very uncomfortable and very angry. I let him know that what he did was disrespectful. I am explaining this to you because I no longer feel comfortable working with him or being near him. If there is something we can do please let me know

Based on the advice of local colleagues and my academic dean, I’m going to move the author of the message to a different team. That said, I wonder whether anyone else in the TBL community has encountered a similar situation and how you handled it (e.g., what did you tell the remaining teammates?). Has anyone published any guidelines for dealing with this sort of situations within a team? Also, I suspect that the student who engaged in the unwanted contact is on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. If so, working in a team was already challenging for this student without throwing in this additional dynamic. I don’t want being respectful of one student’s needs to torpedo the team's or the other student’s chances of success.

All thoughts and suggestions are most welcome!

Laura Madson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, NM 88003
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lauramadson.com
(575) 646-6207