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http://participationhouse.net/our-services/day-services/adult-literacy-school

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Our Adult Literacy School is the only such program in York Region that supports persons with special needs. The program is offered in partnership with the York Region District School Board who provide the wages for the teacher, Madelene Levy.

Students come to the program via the school board, our facilities and the community. We currently support 13-21 students depending on the day of the week. Funding for the program is a combination of various agency sources as well as our fundraising events and designated donations. These funds are used to pay staff wages and benefits as well as purchase all equipment and learning aids for the students.

Through donated funds, we were able to purchase five new touch screen enabled computer systems that allow all students to use them. Here are some benefits enjoyed by the students:

Faster access, saving time in doing research as compared to the old ones that take 10 minutes to start*

The new computers can run larger and more complex programs due to more memory

The touch screen is easy to access for students who find it difficult to use the mouse or keyboard

The students benefit from the big monitor screen as it is easier to read

The new computers take up less space on the desktop

*We still have 10 old computers to replace!

We are the fortunate recipient of grant funding from the Ministry of Community and Social Services to develop custom augmentative communication devices. Using these devices, our students have gained the ability to express themselves in conversation with others, state their wants, and make their own decisions - some for the first time. Using communication devices and tools not only helps the individual to express him/herself, it also helps the caregiver and workers who assist with activities of daily living and education.

Students in the Adult Literacy School are supported in their individual learning styles; whenever possible, learning and communication tools are created and used to assist the students to reach their goals. Here are just a sample of our students' goals:

"I'm working toward gaining an apprenticeship position in the food services industry"
Steven

"I work at a pharmacy to gain money skills to become more independent."
Josh

"I'm working on my literacy skills to be able to take a child and youth worker program at community college."
Avi

"I'm working toward my GED to be able to find employment doing office work."
Anat

Help our students reach their goals... donate to the Adult Literacy Program Now!

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Our Adult Literacy School is the only such program in York Region that supports persons with special needs. The program is offered in partnership with the York Region District School Board who provide the wages for the teacher, Madelene Levy. Students come to the program via the school board, our facilities and the community.

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http://www.eqao.com/students/secondary/10/10.aspx?Lang=E&gr=10

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When doing group work the teacher or students are picking their groups, they must be careful not to have too many heads/partners in the group. For having too many students in a group can take rather purpose out, so instead of contributing ideas, making connection and improving group and communication skills. It can make the student(s) fell that they are a “third wheel”/ don’t feel that they are helping. And this can lead to the student decreasing/lacking in the experience and greatly impact the student’s learning. The same effect can happen even when there is a good number but a student in takes to much control and takes on most of the work.

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Group projects can help a student learn the impotents holding their word and doing what they say they will do. For the student is go to be held accountable to their word/action and this can teach them/get them in the habit of finishing/doing what they said.

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When working in groups the student(s) must learn to take new approaches to resolving differences for everyone is not going to agree with one another. They must learn to lesson then speak and allow everyone to express themselves to a respectable point. This can help them learn to try and take challenges for different approaches and there is always more than one way to do something.

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Some students don’t know how to work in groups and sometimes don't learn anything. If this happens to often the student may prefer to work by themselves. That is also why students have a negative attitude towards group work.

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They are able to put there own ideas and thoughts to their own work.

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Student has the ability to take control of their own work and achieve their goal

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We have literacy proliferation these days. I just Googled emotional literacy, physical literacy, health literacy, social literacy, and different kinds of literacy. I was amazed at what I found.

So what is literacy? To me literacy means the ability to read. The invention of writing is one of mankind's most useful creations. With writing, we can record things. Writing is at the heart of the development of civilization and science. What is more, reading is an essential skill in today's society. People who read well do better professionally and academically.

Children's success in school depends on their ability to read well. As the above video points out, listening is closely related to reading. Children who read well also listen well. Children who read poorly have trouble listening in class. It is a vicious circle, since the ability to listen and to understand the spoken word is extremely important in the development of reading skills.

For people who read well, the written word provides instant meaning. If we see something written, we cannot help but read it and understand it, assuming we know that language. People who don't read, or read poorly, are missing out on a major opportunity to learn and discover things about their world.

Once people read well they can read about health, politics, or any other subject that interests them. As to terms like physical or emotional literacy, these concepts have nothing to do with reading, and represent a misuse of the word literacy, in my view.

Reading is a powerful way to improve one's vocabulary and familiarity with a new language. I mostly listen when learning another language because I can do so while engaged in other tasks. However if I have dedicated time to devote to language learning, my favourite activity is reading. Someone who is a poor reader in his or her own language, will probably have difficulty reading in a second language.

Many jobs require the ability to read fairly difficult texts. Safety manuals, operating manuals, or even instructions on products that we buy are often written in very difficult to understand language. People who have trouble reading are at a significant disadvantage.

So I think it would be a good idea if educators and social scientist stopped confusing the issue of literacy with other forms of knowledge, social skills, or physical training.

Want to learn language from content you love?
Join LingQ for free today!

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What Is Literacy? Are There Different Kinds? - The Linguist

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We have literacy proliferation these days. I just Googled emotional literacy, physical literacy, health literacy, social literacy, and different kinds of literacy. I was amazed at what I found. So what is literacy? To me literacy means the ability to read. The invention of writing is one of mankind's most useful creations.

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Dr. Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, developed his theory of multiple intelligences twenty years ago. Simply put, Dr. Gardner posits that people employ several different types of intelligence, rather than one general type.

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What are we talking about when we say we want to "make literacy a way of life"? We all may use the word "literacy", but may not have the same understanding of what it means.

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What is literacy and how is it 
measured?

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What is literacy and how is it 
measured?

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The research work helped the Canadian government form policies and initiatives based on solid information. The CCL also developed the Composite Learning Index used to measure literacy rate in Canada. The council also published comprehensive reports on the state of Canadian learning in various areas like post-secondary education, health literacy, lifelong learning and so on.

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If students are given time to prepare an answer rather than being obliged to provide immediate responses, they are more likely to produce a considered response and likely to benefit from the time spent working out an appropriate answer.

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Group Work in a Classroom Situation

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Group Work in a Classroom Situation

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Group Work in a Classroom Situation

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College instructors often use group activities and projects to introduce students to collaborative teamwork, which is an essential skill employers are looking for in graduates entering the workforce. Students often reluctantly comply with group work in classes, because of concerns of differing levels of involvement ...

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Some students find it easier to express themselves when they are in a group because their are constant ideas flowing around.

This is helpful in writing because students will

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Working 
in a Team: Advantages and Disadvantages

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Working 
in a Team: Advantages and Disadvantages

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At one time or another most of us are required to work with others on a project.
Everyone from children in elementary school to professionals in IT jobs know how rewarding it can be to work with others, but also how challenging, and even frustrating, it can be at times.

Advantages of Working in a Team

There are many advantages of teamwork. We've all heard the phrase "two heads are better than one." Of course with more minds set on a specific goal, you have access more ideas. Looking at things from the perspective of others can increase the likelihood of quality innovation.
Teams create an environment of support and propel people toward implementation. A team environment can boost the confidence of individuals, allowing them to do their best work.
Good teams make the most of individual talents. Where one member may be weak, another might be strong and working together they provide the perfect resource for an organization. The more people work together, the more they learn and step away to become better workers in their own jobs. Teams can create better communication and respectful relationships among employees.

Disadvantages of Working in a Team

For every advantage of working in a team, there is the flip side. Just as "two heads are better than one," we've all heard, "too many chefs spoil the soup."
Basically, there are just too many people, too many ideas, and too many "experts" to come to an agreement and achieve a good result. It is simply why we have to constantly be reminded that there is "no 'I' in team."

When people can't leave their egos behind, conflict and resentment arises. People become unwilling to open their minds to other perspectives and are intent on either forcing their point of view or not cooperating with others. The more conflict, the less innovation, the farther the team gets from implementation and meeting goals.
While a team has the potential to boost up the individual members, if it is not functioning properly it can make some members feel inferior and unimportant. They contribute less and are discouraged from accessing their strong qualities. How much each person is contributing or not contributing becomes the focus of the individuals - some feeling they are carrying the team, others resenting those who are taking charge.
Relationships and communication worsens. The team is unsuccessful and the individuals walk away worse off than when they started.

What Can You Do to Ensure a Successful Team Environment?

Most of us can say we've experienced being on both types of teams. Here are some tips for maximizing the advantages of teamwork.

For the Manager:

If you are a manager who is forming a team you should set clear, specific expectations and have a dialogue with your employees to be certain they understand these expectations. It is important that they not only understand the goals, but also the reason the team has been created. A good manager will allow a team to function without hovering over it, but will be fully involved by eliciting information on a consistent basis, rather than waiting for the deadline to evaluate the results.
Communicate with your team, evaluate performance and commitment, and step in to assist when necessary. The team may very well need additional resources or input from you.

For the Team Member:

If you have just been assigned to a team, take the time to listen to others in the group. Be involved in the process, as there will be a process that sorts out responsibilities and leadership roles (whether official or not), but open your mind and realize teamwork takes patience, understanding, and mutual respect and support.
Yes, you want to be supported by the team, but this can only happen if you support others. The first step in being a successful team member understands your mission.

If you are given or volunteer for a particular role, understand your role and own it! Make the decision to be a problem solver. Do not look to place blame and do not focus on the negative. Stand up and make things better, rather than sitting back and complaining.
You will feel good about yourself and help the team by making it better for everyone. A negative attitude can be contagious....but so can a positive one! Constantly practice tolerance and keep communication open with all members of the team and management.

It is often a team victory we rejoice in and remember above all others. The team environment can be very rewarding and a team's success does depend on you, the individual. Your commitment to your team, despite obstacles, is vital to its success.

Lynn Mattoon is a Content Editor and Career Writer for Beyond.com career community. You can follow her on Twitter at Beyond Careers.

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working in a team: advantages and disadvantages

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Working in a Team: Advantages and Disadvantages

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There are many advantages of Working on a Team. We've all heard the phrase "two heads are better than one." Of course with more minds set on a specific goal, you have access more ideas. Looking at things from the perspective of others can increase the likelihood of quality innovation.

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what is independent learning and what are the benefits for students?

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what is independent learning and what are the benefits for students?

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putting two ideas together will lead to a whole new conclusion and discussion. This will give more understanding on the text.

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The student will be able to focus on their work, without being interrupted by their peers.

Learning individually will help students be more focused on their learning.

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More connections to the text will give more ideas to students when they are

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When group members have a discussion together, they often relate things to their experiences, which shows connection. This can help students develop their connection skills, so when they reading or writing something in their daily lives, they can easily make connections and thus, have a better understanding of when they are looking at.

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Group Work

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Group Work

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Determining whether assignments should be completed individually or in small groups is a major decision for business school faculty. There are various considerations behind making this important decision. In some situations, group work is appropriate at the undergraduate level; however, there is an overabundance of group work and for the wrong reason. Candidly, the real motivation behind most undergraduate group work is that it substantially reduces grading effort for faculty, or their graduate students. The math is simple: Group assignments with four students per group reduce grading effort by 75%.

The majority of undergraduate business students would benefit much more from being assigned more individual work.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Group Work

Any good decision should be made based on understanding the pros and cons involved. Considerations in group vs. individual work are as shown.

Advantages of Group Work
(Disadvantages of not Using Individual Work)

Disadvantages of Group Work
(Advantages of Using Individual Work)

Students learn quality skills and insights from one another, especially from the variation of work experience and relevant courses taken.

Students learn effective project team skills.

Students achieve socialization and professional networking.

Stronger students help educate the weaker students.

Faculty grading time is reduced immensely.

Learning is inconsistent as stronger students contribute the majority of work and learn a great deal, but weaker/unmotivated students contribute little and learn little.

Conflicts in compatible meeting times outside of class resulting in precious class time being consumed for groups to meet.

Faculty must be involved in "policing" groups, which may involve some sort of written process where students evaluate each other. This results in both complexity and easily disputable judgments.

The Realities of Group Work: Problems Burdensome and Unproductive

Too often, the disadvantages of group work outweigh the advantages at the undergraduate level. High-achieving students get frustrated by completing the lion's share of the work, dealing with procrastination among the lower-commitment-level students, and experiencing unproductive meetings. Often, the high achievers determine that it would be more efficient to do it themselves, or with a smaller portion of group members.

I do not consistently see students absorbing the learning objectives from group assignments. You have the haves and the have-not syndrome. Some students learning a great deal and some students are earning high grades but not actually learning. I have witnessed even very astute students take a total back seat on important group assignments. In a Management Information Systems course students convinced me to make a key Systems Requirements assignment into a group project for teams of two that I initially assigned as individual work. Students had to personally interview a physician group to uncover its typical system requirements, including billing, scheduling, medical records, payroll, general ledger, etc. Two top students worked together and earned 100 on the group assignment, but one performed miserably on a major section of the upcoming test on system requirements concepts. Despite a grade of 100 on the group assignment, this student had not learned much from the assignment. What is a professor accomplishing with group assignments in such situations?

To deal with the have and the have-not syndrome in group assignments, my older sister, who is a professor in the Midwest, has devised a system where students submit evaluations of each other's contributions. It is hard enough being a professor without taking on being a "judge" policing and evaluating the opinions of fellow students on one another.

Group Work Can Waste Precious Class Time

In attending a fellow professor's classes for a course I was to teach the next semester, I noticed that he was letting student groups meet during class time. These students all lived on campus and few had outside work responsibilities (geographical and work schedule issues had been other reasons to consume class time for group meetings at other universities where I teach). Why was he using precious class time when students all live in close proximity to the campus? He explained that student activities made it difficult for them, primarily the athletes, to meet outside of class. A typical semester, excluding two testing periods, is only 38 hours of class time which is less than one real-world work week. Can professors truly afford to consume precious class time for groups to meet?

When is Group Work at Undergraduate Level Appropriate? High Admissions Standards

There are few undergraduate programs where students have extensive-enough work experience or academic coursework background to contribute much to a group environment. The merits of group work only arise in undergraduate business programs where consistent, high numbers of participants possess:

Commitment and initiative

Intelligence

Time-management skills

Time available for regular meetings

What undergraduate business schools possess high-enough thresholds of such students attributes to minimize the occurrence of weak students undermining the benefits of group work? The answer involves whether the business school has high-enough admissions requirements to weed out weaker students. It is common for students at the nation's top undergraduate business schools to either apply during their freshman or sophomore year with GPAs exceeding 3.6, along with good extracurricular activities, or be admitted as an incoming freshmen possessing exceptionally high aptitude test scores (SAT/ACT) and high secondary grades.

On the other hand, there are many quality business schools where just about anyone can get admitted with GPA requirements as low as 2.5. Not every undergraduate business school is in the position to attract top notch students by maintaining strict admissions standards. Many deans and department heads have financial pressures to maintain high student counts that lead them to be more concerned about student quantity than quality. Higher student counts often correlate to higher departmental budgets for full-time faculty, attracting graduate students for research, and other allocations. An emphasis on quantity can compromise the quality of their student talent pool and severely affect whether group work will be productive.

In talking with faculty, I often hear that assigning group work is vital to developing project coordination skills students will use in the workplace with a wide spectrum of co-workers . I do not agree with this argument as there is a much larger variation of student talents than co-worker talents. In the workplace, there is a much higher barometer in talent, motivation, commitment, and ease of meeting coordination. I guarantee that business students working for typical companies (Microsoft, Deloitte, Hyatt, etc.) will not be performing group projects with "slackers" as they will not be around very long.

Propelling Forward Individual Work Requires a Change in Priorities

The decision to assign group work should involve a careful assessment of the merits of the students in a given class and apparent student population attributes overall. Many professors do not weigh these considerations, but are influenced solely by the pressures of their positions to reduce the time involved with instructing students. Research, publishing, presentations, and committee work are the priorities of the vast majority of today's undergraduate business school faculty. Priorities associated with instructing students usually come after those that drive tenure, compensation, and day-to-day departmental recognition.

What is the bottom line? For students to uniformly absorb the key learning objectives from their coursework, the majority of undergraduate business schools need to advocate to their professors to assign work individually, rather than rely on group work to the extent they now do.

Illustration by: Michael Scearce, IMGFX Design

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individual versus group work in business school

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The Unfortunate Motivation Behind Assigning Group Work

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Determining whether assignments should be completed individually or in small groups is a major decision for business school faculty. There are various considerations behind making this important decision. In some situations, group work is appropriate at the undergraduate level; however, there is an overabundance of group work and for the wrong reason.

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Individual can learn how to break down work within a group assignment, and that becomes a skill that they develop, which could help them understand other things like a text, by breaking information down to understand it better.

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Interest in reading/writing, or any other task would lead to students wanting to spend their own time improving on these skills

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In groups, students learn to support each other, and motivate each other to accomplish a task on time or together, whether it is reading, writing, or any assignments, which can make the students more interested in the work.

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Through constructive discussions, students can improve their vocabulary, and improve the way they think because their peers may have a different perspective on things, and when learning from each other, it would give them a wider understanding of things.

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"When students are trying to explain things to each other, to argue for an answer, or to justify a conclusion, that interaction clarifies their own thinking and often it clarifies the thinking of other students. "

- See more at: http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/five-things-students-can-learn-through-group-work/#sthash.EyVgxqK8.dpuf

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Over the past couple of decades, a cult has grown up around teams. Even in a society as fiercely independent as America, teams are considered almost sacrosanct. The belief that working in teams makes us more creative and productive is so widespread that when faced with a challenging new task, leaders are quick to assume that teams are the best way to get the job done.

Not so fast, says J. Richard Hackman, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard University and a leading expert on teams. Hackman has spent a career exploring-and questioning-the wisdom of teams. To learn from his insights, HBR senior editor Diane Coutu interviewed Hackman in his Harvard office. In the course of their discussion, he revealed just how bad people often are at teamwork. Most of the time, his research shows, team members don't even agree on what the team is supposed to be doing. Getting agreement is the leader's job, and she must be willing to take great personal and professional risks to set the team's direction. And if the leader isn't disciplined about managing who is on the team and how it is set up, the odds are slim that a team will do a good job.

What follows is an edited version of that conversation.

You begin your book Leading Teams with a pop quiz: When people work together to build a house, will the job probably (a) get done faster, (b) take longer to finish, or (c) not get done?

That multiple choice question actually appeared on a standardized fourth-grade test in Ohio, and the obvious "answer," of course, is supposed to be a -the work gets done faster. I love that anecdote because it illustrates how early we're told that teamwork is good. People tend to think that teams are the democratic-and the efficient-way to get things done. I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary, a collective creation of previously unimagined quality or beauty. But don't count on it. Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have. That's because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of collaboration. And even when you have a strong and cohesive team, it's often in competition with other teams, and that dynamic can also get in the way of real progress. So you have two strikes against you right from the start, which is one reason why having a team is often worse than having no team at all.

You've said that for a team to be successful, it needs to be real. What does that mean?

At the very least, it means that teams have to be bounded. It may seem silly to say this, but if you're going to lead a team, you ought to first make sure that you know who's on it. In our recent book Senior Leadership Teams, Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss, and I collected and analyzed data on more than 120 top teams around the world. Not surprisingly, we found that almost every senior team we studied thought that it had set unambiguous boundaries. Yet when we asked members to describe their team, fewer than 10% agreed about who was on it. And these were teams of senior executives!

Often the CEO is responsible for the fuzziness of team boundaries. Fearful of seeming exclusionary-or, on the other end of the spectrum, determined to put people on the team for purely political reasons-the chief executive frequently creates a dysfunctional team. In truth, putting together a team involves some ruthless decisions about membership; not everyone who wants to be on the team should be included, and some individuals should be forced off.

We worked with a large financial services firm where the CFO wasn't allowed on the executive committee because he was clearly a team destroyer. He was disinclined toward teamwork, he was unwilling to work at finding collective solutions, and every team he was on got into trouble. The CEO invited the CFO to stay in his role because he was a truly able executive, but he was not allowed on the senior executive team. Although there were some bruised feelings at first, in the end the CFO was much happier because he didn't have to be in "boring" team meetings, and the team functioned much better without him. The arrangement worked because the CEO communicated extensively with the CFO both before and after every executive committee meeting. And in the CFO's absence, the committee could become a real team.

You also say that a team needs a compelling direction. How does it get one?

There is no one right way to set a direction; the responsibility can fall to the team leader or to someone in the organization outside the team or even to the team itself in the case of partnerships or boards of directors. But however it's done, setting a direction is emotionally demanding because it always involves the exercise of authority, and that inevitably arouses angst and ambivalence-for both the person exercising it and the people on the receiving end. Leaders who are emotionally mature are willing and able to move toward anxiety-inspiring situations as they establish a clear, challenging team direction. But in doing so, a leader sometimes encounters resistance so intense that it can place his or her job at risk.

That point was dramatically brought home to me a few years ago by a participant in an executive seminar I was teaching. I'd been talking about how leaders who set direction successfully are unafraid to assume personal responsibility for the mission of the team. I mentioned John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and I got carried away and said that people who read the New Testament knew that Jesus did not convene little team meetings to decide the goals of the ministry. One of the executives in the class interrupted me and said, "Are you aware that you've just talked about two assassinations and a crucifixion?"

What are some common fallacies about teams?

People generally think that teams that work together harmoniously are better and more productive than teams that don't. But in a study we conducted on symphonies, we actually found that grumpy orchestras played together slightly better than orchestras in which all the musicians were really quite happy.

That's because the cause-and-effect is the reverse of what most people believe: When we're productive and we've done something good together (and are recognized for it), we feel satisfied, not the other way around. In other words, the mood of the orchestra members after a performance says more about how well they did than the mood beforehand.

Another fallacy is that bigger teams are better than small ones because they have more resources to draw upon. A colleague and I once did some research showing that as a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate. It's managing the links between members that gets teams into trouble. My rule of thumb is no double digits. In my courses, I never allow teams of more than six students. Big teams usually wind up just wasting everybody's time. That's why having a huge senior leadership team-say, one that includes all the CEO's direct reports-may be worse than having no team at all.

Perhaps the most common misperception about teams, though, is that at some point team members become so comfortable and familiar with one another that they start accepting one another's foibles, and as a result performance falls off. Except for one special type of team, I have not been able to find a shred of evidence to support that premise. There is a study that shows that R&D teams do need an influx of new talent to maintain creativity and freshness-but only at the rate of one person every three to four years. The problem almost always is not that a team gets stale but, rather, that it doesn't have the chance to settle in.

So newness is a liability?

Absolutely. The research confirming that is incontrovertible. Consider crews flying commercial airplanes. The National Transportation Safety Board found that 73% of the incidents in its database occurred on a crew's first day of flying together, before people had the chance to learn through experience how best to operate as a team-and 44% of those took place on a crew's very first flight. Also, a NASA study found that fatigued crews who had a history of working together made about half as many errors as crews composed of rested pilots who had not flown together before.

So why don't airlines stick to the same crews?

Because it isn't efficient from a financial perspective. Financially, you get the most from your capital equipment and labor by treating each airplane and each pilot as an individual unit and then using an algorithm to maximize their utilization. That means that pilots often have to dash up and down the concourses just as passengers do, and sometimes you'll have a pilot who will fly two or three different aircraft with two or three different crews in the course of a single day-which is not so wise if you look at the research. I once asked an operations researcher of an airline to estimate how long it would take, if he and I were assigned to work together on a trip, before we could expect to work together again. He calculated that it would be 5.6 years. Clearly, this is not good from a passenger point of view.

The counterexample, by the way, is the Strategic Air Command, or SAC, which would have delivered nuclear bombs had that become necessary during the Cold War years. SAC teams performed better than any other flight crews that we studied. They trained together as a crew, and they became superb at working together because they had to. When you're working together in real time and there can be no mistakes, then you keep your teams together for years and years rather than constantly change their composition.

If teams need to stay together to achieve the best performance, how do you prevent them from becoming complacent?

This is where what I call a deviant comes in. Every team needs a deviant, someone who can help the team by challenging the tendency to want too much homogeneity, which can stifle creativity and learning. Deviants are the ones who stand back and say, "Well, wait a minute, why are we even doing this at all? What if we looked at the thing backwards or turned it inside out?" That's when people say, "Oh, no, no, no, that's ridiculous," and so the discussion about what's ridiculous comes up. Unlike the CFO I mentioned before, who derailed the team by shutting down discussions, the deviant opens up more ideas, and that gets you a lot more originality. In our research, we've looked carefully at both teams that produced something original and those that were merely average, where nothing really sparkled. It turned out that the teams with deviants outperformed teams without them. In many cases, deviant thinking is a source of great innovation.

I would add, though, that often the deviant veers from the norm at great personal cost. Deviants are the individuals who are willing to say the thing that nobody else is willing to articulate. The deviant raises people's level of anxiety, which is a brave thing to do. When the boat is floating with the current, it really is extraordinarily courageous for somebody to stand up and say, "We've got to pause and probably change direction." Nobody on the team wants to hear that, which is precisely why many team leaders crack down on deviants and try to get them to stop asking difficult questions, maybe even knock them off the team. And yet it's when you lose the deviant that the team can become mediocre.

What makes a team effective, and how can a team's leader make it perform better?

A good team will satisfy its internal or external clients, become stronger as a unit as time passes, and foster the learning and growth of its individual members. But even the best leader on the planet can't make a team do well. All anyone can do is increase the likelihood that a team will be great by putting into place five conditions. (See the sidebar "How to Build a Team.") And the leader still will have no guarantees that she will create a magical team. Teams create their own realities and control their own destinies to a greater extent, and far sooner in their existence, than most team leaders realize.

In his book Leading Teams, J. Richard Hackman sets out five basic conditions that leaders of companies and other organizations must fulfill in order to create and maintain effective teams:

1: Teams must be real. People have to know who is on the team and who is not. It's the leader's job to make that clear.

2: Teams need a compelling direction. Members need to know, and agree on, what they're supposed to be doing together. Unless a leader articulates a clear direction, there is a real risk that different members will pursue different agendas.

3: Teams need enabling structures. Teams that have poorly designed tasks, the wrong number or mix of members, or fuzzy and unenforced norms of conduct invariably get into trouble.

4: Teams need a supportive organization. The organizational context-including the reward system, the human resource system, and the information system-must facilitate teamwork.

5: Teams need expert coaching. Most executive coaches focus on individual performance, which does not significantly improve teamwork. Teams need coaching as a group in team processes-especially at the beginning, midpoint, and end of a team project.

In 1990 I edited a collection of essays by colleagues who had studied teams performing diverse tasks in 27 organizations-everything from a children's theater company to a mental-health-treatment team to a beer-sales-and-delivery team. In those studies, we found that the things that happen the first time a group meets strongly affect how the group operates throughout its entire life. Indeed, the first few minutes of the start of any social system are the most important because they establish not only where the group is going but also what the relationship will be between the team leader and the group, and what basic norms of conduct will be expected and enforced.

by Michael Beschloss

If the launch of a team is as critical as Professor J. Richard Hackman says, then Barack Obama has done pretty well. He appointed his administration's top officials much faster than most presidents do. Given the monumental crises that faced him the moment he was elected, he had to move quickly. The downside of speed was that some of his choices didn't work out-notably Bill Richardson and Tom Daschle. Obama has certainly brought onto his team people of strong temperaments and contrasting views, starting with Hillary Clinton at the State Department and Jim Jones at the National Security Council. This suggests that we have a president who is unusually sure of his own ability to absorb differing opinions. Appointing people like Clinton also shows his eagerness to harness the talent of his former opponents. Compare that with the record of George W. Bush; his people told many job seekers who had supported John McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries, "Sorry, you backed the wrong horse!"

Of course, Obama is taking a risk by hiring so many strong and contentious personalities. He will inevitably have to spend a lot of time and energy serving as referee. This is what happened with Franklin Roosevelt, who also brought strong-minded figures into his government. One difference with Obama, however, is that FDR temperamentally loved the infighting. He liked to pit people against one another, believing that competition evoked the best performance from everyone. At times FDR actually enjoyed making his underlings suffer. I don't think Obama does.

Most presidents prefer a happy ship, and in some cases their definition of loyalty includes not rocking the boat on major administration programs. Richard Nixon fired his interior secretary, Walter Hickel, for opposing his Vietnam War policies. There was a dissenter (what Hackman calls a deviant) on Lyndon Johnson's team-Undersecretary of State George Ball, who strongly opposed the Vietnam War. Johnson would cite Ball when people complained that he surrounded himself with yes-men, but in fact Ball had little influence when LBJ met with top officials on Vietnam. Everyone in the group knew that Johnson didn't take Ball's antiwar arguments very seriously. If you really want dissenting views, better to use the Roosevelt-Obama model, where they can come from almost any member of the team-and not just from one designated rabble-rouser.

The reappointment of Bush's defense secretary, Robert Gates, also reveals Obama's self-confidence. He's clearly willing to concede that there are things he doesn't know, so he appointed someone with more than three decades of national security experience. This decision has the historical echo of John Kennedy's near-reappointment in 1961 of Dwight Eisenhower's defense secretary, who coincidentally was named Thomas Gates. Like Obama, Kennedy was a young president with little national security background and thought it might reassure people to have the previous defense secretary stay on at the Pentagon. Like Obama, JFK also suspected that a number of things might go wrong with national security during his first year as president. He felt that Americans might be less likely to blame the Democratic president if a Republican secretary of defense was there at his side. In the end Kennedy did not have the stomach for the risk of keeping a Republican appointee at the Pentagon. Obama did.

Obama's first months in office prove the importance of having a president who can convey his view of the country and the world and why he thinks his plans will work. One of Hillary Clinton's biggest criticisms a year ago was that Obama gave great speeches but that it didn't have all that much to do with being a strong president. Obama argued that it did, and he was right. Like Roosevelt's addresses in 1933 and Reagan's in 1981, his public utterances-especially his speech to Congress in February-have done a lot to gain acceptance for his programs from skeptical Americans. However jaded they may be about government, Americans-even those who didn't vote for him-are still inclined to turn to their president to explain foreign and domestic crises. Imagine how much more anxious they might feel now if Obama did not do this so effectively. Unfortunately for us all, it's likely that he'll have to call more on that skill as the crisis mounts in the months ahead.

Michael Beschloss has written nine books about presidential leadership, most recently Presidential Courage (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

I once asked Christopher Hogwood, the distinguished conductor for many years of the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston, how important the first rehearsal was when he served as an orchestra's guest conductor. "What do you mean, the first rehearsal?" he asked. "All I have is the first few minutes." He went on to explain that there's nothing he pays greater attention to than the way he starts the first rehearsal. That's because he knows that the orchestra members will make a very quick assessment about whether or not they're going to make great music together, or whether he is just going to get in their way.

I do think there is one thing leaders such as Hogwood and others can do to improve the chances that a team will become something special, and that is to embrace their own quirkiness. You shouldn't try to lead like Jeff Bezos, because you are not Jeff Bezos. Each leader brings to the task his or her own strengths and weaknesses. Exploit the daylights out of the stuff you're great at, and get help in the areas where you're not so good. Don't try to ape any leadership model or team, because there's no one right style for leading a team. There are many different ways to create the conditions for effectiveness, sustain them, and help teams take full advantage of them. The best team leaders are like jazz players, improvising constantly as they go along.

How good are companies at providing a supportive context for teams?

Perversely, the organizations with the best human resource departments often do things that are completely at odds with good team behavior. That's because HR departments tend to put in place systems that are really good at guiding, directing, and correcting individual behavior. Take a personnel system that has been honed by industrial psychologists to identify the skills of a particular job and test individual employees on those skills. In such a system, the HR department will set up training to develop the "right" people in the "right" way. The problem is this is all about the individual. This single-minded focus on the individual employee is one of the main reasons that teams don't do as well as they might in organizations with strong HR departments. Just look at our research on senior executive teams. We found that coaching individual team members did not do all that much to help executive teams perform better.

For the team to reap the benefits of coaching, it must focus on group processes. And timing is everything. The team leader needs to know how to run a launch meeting, so that members become oriented to and engaged with their tasks; how to help the team review at the midpoint what's functioning well-and what isn't-which can correct the team's performance strategy; and how to take a few minutes when the work is finished to reflect on what went well or poorly, which can help members make better use of their knowledge and experience the next time around. Team coaching is about fostering better teamwork on the task, not about enhancing members' social interactions or interpersonal relationships.

There's a lot of talk about virtual teams these days. Can they work, or are they falling victim to what Jo Freeman once called the "tyranny of structurelessness"?

Virtual teams have really come into their own in the past decade, but I don't believe they differ fundamentally from traditional teams. There was a fantasy in the beginning that everyone would be swarming around on the internet, that the wisdom of crowds would automatically prevail, and that structureless groups would come up with new and profound things that face-to-face groups could never have generated. But nirvana never materialized; virtual teams need the basic conditions for effectiveness to be in place just as much as face-to-face teams, if not more so. That said, we are seeing that we can make do with much less face-to-face contact than we ever thought possible. Today's technology, for example, lets you have a chat window open during a web conference so you can type in the word "hand" to signal that you want to talk next. People don't need to see your face to know that you want to speak up. But even well-structured virtual teams need to have a launch meeting with everyone present, a midpoint check-in that's face-to-face, and a live debriefing. I don't think for a minute that we're going to have effective online teams if we don't know who's on the team or what the main work of the team really is, and so far that's still a problem with virtual teams.

Given the difficulty of making teams work, should we be rethinking their importance in organizations?

Perhaps. Many people act as if being a team player is the ultimate measure of one's worth, which it clearly is not. There are many things individuals can do better on their own, and they should not be penalized for it. Go back for a moment to that fourth-grade question about working together to build a house. The answer probably is that teamwork really does take longer or that the house may not get built at all. There are many cases where collaboration, particularly in truly creative endeavors, is a hindrance rather than a help. The challenge for a leader, then, is to find a balance between individual autonomy and collective action. Either extreme is bad, though we are generally more aware of the downside of individualism in organizations, and we forget that teams can be just as destructive by being so strong and controlling that individual voices and contributions and learning are lost.

In one management team we studied, for example, being a team player was so strongly valued that individuals self-censored their contributions for fear of disrupting team harmony. The team, in a spirit of cooperation and goodwill, embarked on a course of action that was bound to fail-for reasons that some members sensed but did not mention as the plans were being laid. One wonders if the crisis in the financial world today would be quite so catastrophic if more people had spoken out in their team meetings about what they knew to be wrongful practices. But again that brings us back to the hazards of courage. You'd like to think that people who do the courageous right thing and speak out will get their reward on earth as well as in heaven. But you don't always get your reward here on earth. While it's true that not being on a team can put your career on hold, being a real and committed team player-whether as a team leader, a deviant, or just a regular member who speaks the truth-can be dangerous business indeed.

A version of this article appeared in the May 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Reprint: R0905H Interviewed by Diane Coutu The belief that teams make us more creative and productive-and are the best way to get things done-is deeply entrenched. But Hackman, a professor of organizational psychology at Harvard and a leading expert on teams, is having none of it.

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Why a Great Individual Is Better Than a Good Team

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Why a Great Individual Is Better Than a Good Team

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Anytime a CEO, quarterback, engineer or author is paid ridiculous amounts of money, dozens of investors, armchair quarterbacks, and scholars jump in to debate the value of individual contributors versus teams. Bill Taylor wrote the most recent of many interesting pieces, where he argued provocatively that " great people are overrated," in response to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's comment that a great engineer is worth 100 average engineers.

I have heard plenty of people argue that no one individual is worth the price of many. But interestingly, I have never heard it from a leader.

As a CEO, I have run public companies, private companies, startups, turnarounds, and divestitures - in each and every case, I have never seen a situation where quantity is better than quality when it comes to people. Never. Great people are both hard to find and worth an infinite number of average people.

And as a brain scientist, I know that great individuals are not only more valuable than legions of mediocrity, they are often more valuable than groups that include great individuals. Here's why:

The truth is, our brains work very well individually but tend to break down in groups. This is why we have individual decision makers in business (and why paradoxically we have group decisions in government). Programmers are exponentially faster when coding as individuals; designers do their best work alone; artists rarely collaborate and when they do, it rarely goes well. There are exceptions to every rule, but in general this holds true.

There is clearly not widespread acknowledgment about the benefits of individual contributors - in many ways, it goes against our inclination towards equality. And thank goodness, because that gives those of us who understand the real value of great people a huge competitive advantage! But for anyone interested in making better decisions about their teams, it is worth spending some time understanding the science behind individual greatness.

In many ways, individual people follow an inverse rule relative to networks of people. Consider the two fundamental laws of networks: both Metcalfe's Law and Reed's Law assume that as a network of people grows, the value of the network increases substantially. (In Metcalfe's Law, the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of people in the network, whereas Reed's Law demonstrates that the value for any individual within a network grows exponentially with every new member.) But with individuals, the opposite is true: The value of a contributor decreases disproportionately with each additional person contributing to a single project, idea, or innovation.

This is true across all areas but only so far as there are discrete pieces of work to be done. To be sure, there is clear value in having a marketing person work with a programmer on a project or a biologist working with a chemist on a problem. Proper team building is a powerful thing. But when an activity can be performed sufficiently by one person with adequate skills, doing the activity as a group should be avoided.

The concept of declining incremental value is essentially a " power function" or, more technically, a scale invariance - where the greatest impact comes from the smallest proportion of the population. There are numerous examples of power functions, including Stevens' law, Keplar's law, the long tail, Zipf's law, and the Pareto principle (or 80/20 rule). And power laws explain plenty of events in nature (i.e., earthquakes), finance (i.e., income distribution), language ( word frequency), and even ecommerce (i.e., book sales on Amazon). Virtually all complex systems follow power laws within the system itself.

Here's how power functions relate to the brain. As described in my book Wired for Thought, the brain is a complex network of neurons. There are around 100 billion neurons connected to one another in the brain and they follow a network law - the value of a neuron is exponentially more valuable as the overall neural network grows. But when the brain becomes highly active, it reverts to a power law where a spike in activity is followed by a lull. Informally called neuronal avalanches, these spikes have been linked to knowledge transfer and storage, communication, and computational power - in short, intelligence.

The same is true when it comes to people. Our intelligence is incredibly complex and as a result, a great individual can far exceed the value of many mediocre minds. This is why it is absurd to ask questions like "how many mediocre people would it take to collectively beat Kasparov in a chess match?"

Mediocre minds can also destroy the value or contribution of a great mind. No matter how good Kasparov is at chess, he would not do well playing doubles with a mediocre chess player against Bobby Fisher alone. Or take Michelangelo's David as an example. A second artist cutting into David would cause massive destruction to the sculpture, even if that artist was Picasso. With each successive stroke of the chisel from additional artists, David's value, beauty, and overall impact would diminish. A perfect - albeit destructive - example of a power function.

Leaders need to make tough decisions all the time. One decision is easy: find the best people and empower them to do great things.

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Why a Great Individual Is Better Than a Good Team

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Anytime a CEO, quarterback, engineer or author is paid ridiculous amounts of money, dozens of investors, armchair quarterbacks, and scholars jump in to debate the value of individual contributors versus teams. Bill Taylor wrote the most recent of many interesting pieces, where he argued provocatively that "great people are overrated," in response to Facebook CEO [...]

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Students can learn from each other

When students are told to do an assignment, to read, or to come up with solutions, they would often learn more from each other by sharing their knowledge to figure things out, rather than constantly relying on their teachers. This also helps a student learn to use the resources they have around them.

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Maybe we can use something from this link?

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Teamwork and individualism are particularly interesting human characteristics because despite being antonyms, they are both universally valued and their importance to society is considered a truism. However, in order to practice teamwork or individualism you must, by definition, subordinate one to the other. ...

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And thank you

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Five Things Students Can Learn through Group Work(link)

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Five Things Students Can Learn through Group Work(link)

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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I often get questions about group work. Recently, the question was phrased like this: "Can students learn anything in groups?" And, like faculty sometimes do, this questioner proceeded with the answer. "I don't think my students can. When they work in groups they have no interest in doing quality work. Whatever the first person says, they all agree with that and relax into a social conversation."

Standing opposite the experience of faculty members like this one is an accumulation of research that strongly supports students learning from and with each other in groups. There's research and analyses of group learning now reported in virtually every discipline. Here are five things students can learn in groups, all well-established by a wide range of empirical analyses.

1. They can learn content, as in master the material. Whether they are working on problems, answering questions about the reading, or discussing case studies, when students work together on content, they can master the basics. The reason they learn is pretty straightforward, when students work with content in a group they are figuring things out for themselves rather than having the teacher tell them what they need to know.

2. They can learn content at those deeper levels we equate with understanding. I just highlighted an article for the April issue of The Teaching Professor newsletter which reported that the explanations students wrote to justify a chosen answer were stronger after just seven minutes of discussion with two or three students. When students are trying to explain things to each other, to argue for an answer, or to justify a conclusion, that interaction clarifies their own thinking and often it clarifies the thinking of other students.

3. They can learn how groups function productively. In order for groups to function productively, students must fulfill individual responsibilities. Productive group members come prepared, they contribute to the group interaction, they support each other, and they deliver good work on time. In order for individuals to function productively in groups, they have the right to expect the group to value their individual contributions, to address behaviors that compromise group productivity, and to divide the work equitably among members.

4. They can learn why groups make better decisions than individuals. Students can see how different perspectives, constructive deliberation, questioning, and critical analysis can result in better solutions and performance. If students take an exam individually and then do the same exam as a group, the group exam score is almost always higher because students share what they know, debate the answers, and through that process can often find their way to the right answer.

5. They can learn how to work with others. Group work helps students learn how to work with people outside their circle of friends, including those who have different backgrounds and experiences. They can even learn how to work with those who disagree with them, and others they might not "like" or want as friends.

Now, it is absolutely true that students don't learn any of these things just by being put together in groups. Student attitudes about group work are often negative and that's because they've been in lots of groups where they didn't learn anything other than the fact they don't like working in groups. Much of the group work used in college classrooms is not well designed or well managed. But when group work is carefully constructed and when teachers help students deal with those group dynamic issues that compromise group effectiveness, students can learn the content and the skills listed above.

It would also be nice to be able to end this post with a reference of a comprehensive review of research on group work. I don't think that piece exists. Research that documents that students can learn these five things is so scattered across the disciplinary landscape that finding it all and then devising some way to quantitatively compare the results is all but impossible. But just because the findings aren't organized or integrated does not diminish what has been documented time and again in study after study. Students can learn from and with each other in groups.

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Five Things Students Can Learn through Group Work

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I often get questions about group work. Recently, the question was phrased like this: "Can students learn anything in groups?" And, like faculty sometimes do, this questioner proceeded with the answer. "I don't think my students can. When they work in groups they have no interest in doing quality work.

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Student have there own  learning styles, cognitive styles, psychological type, or multiple intelligence.

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At there own pace the student has a better understanding of the concept and is highly learned-centred when working individually

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Group members can process information and construct higher quality schemata in long term memory compared the those working individually because they are sharing cognitive load.

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Motivation

Are all the students in the group motivated to read/write? When one student loses focus, so will the person next to them.

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Individual versus group learning as a function of task complexity: An exploration into the measurement of group cognitive load

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The target of this study is twofold; on the one hand, it is an empirical study into the learning effectiveness of group versus individual learning as a function of task complexity; on the other hand, it is an exploration into the measurement of group

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18 Months

A child learns a new word every 2 hours.

2 Years

The child starts to make short sentences with the words they have learned.

24-30 Months

The child learns to form longer sentences.

30-36 months

The child learns to follow rules in literacy to express themselves (ex. Who, Would, Why, etc)

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-Prose Literacy

-Document Literacy

-Quantitative Literacy

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The Gradual process of learning to understand and use language that begins at birth and continues though early childhood years (grade 3).

Children surrounded by language from birth becomes fluent speakers at age of 3, regardless of intelligence.

hey make language discoveries as they play, explore, and interact with each other

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Applying the Use it Or Lose it Theory to Elementary Students

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Applying the Use it Or Lose it Theory to Elementary Students

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Since elementary students are still in their developing stages,

would encouraging children to read and write about 4-5 times

a week at an early age have a higher increase on their literacy rates?

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People who read 4 times a week,

or write atleast 5 times a week generally have

higher literacy rate (3.7% Higher!)

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Wikipedia's definition of Literacy is the ability to read and write, and develop those skills, however "True Literacy" is having the ability to analyze, and understand the ideas and terms within

a text.

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Learning at their own pace and skill level rather than staying at a general level.

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Unconsciously learning new things from peers