The Team Milestone Process: Integrated Team Activities to Track Team Development

The well established use of teams in the classroom and in business has increased the need for teaching students tangible team skills. More than merely imparting knowledge about teams from an abstract perspective students need to graduate with effective team experiences. This paper presents a milestone process that helps students develop as a team and provides students with the opportunity to reflect on and learn from their experiences. As students familiarize themselves with different team processes and dynamics, this process allows students to hone their team skill with feedback from instructors who now have an additional tool to monitor and coach the students on an ongoing basis. For example, the milestone process allows the instructor to provide students with an early progress report on their semester projects while giving the instructor an opportunity for course content clarification and valuable early feedback that students can use for project revision. This paper describes the team milestone process along with instructions, grading, and possible modification and also presents feedback from instructors and students after use in an undergraduate organizational behavior course.