Group work is a fixture in college courses, with faculty using it for any number of reasons: to promote engaged learning, to prepare students for future work in their careers and communities, and even to reduce grading load. In thinking about how to ensure that group activities effectively support student learning, I advocate that we build in developing collaborative skills and inclusive practices as learning goals. In other words, let’s help students shift from working in groups (“a number of people or things that are together in the same place,” per Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries) to teams (“a group of people who perform interdependent tasks to work towards accomplishing a common mission or specific objective,” according to the American Society for Quality). I have put together a set of reflective metacognitive strategies to help strengthen this aim. In keeping with the teams metaphor, I have organized these course activities into the structure of a game or match.
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