Team learning is important for effective teamwork. However, it is not unusual that teachers in staff or project meetings are not searching for common ground and maintain their individual, instead of a collective, perspective. Team meetings are therefore often suboptimal, as team learning opportunities are being missed, which can hamper the quality of educational innovation and teaching quality improvement. Research of Hildert Zoethout et al, based on in-depth analysis of video-recorded deliberations of meetings of three teacher teams, has shown that team learning depends on using team member’s reasoning together. Without such transactivity of team reasoning the learning potential of the team is hampered, which may have effects on the quality of educational programs and related teaching and learning.
Full citation:
Zoethout, H., R. Wesselink, P. Runhaar, & M. Mulder (2017). Using Transactivity to Understand Emergence of Team Learning. Small Group Research, 48(2), pp. 190–214.
Abstract: ‘Team learning is a recurrent topic in research on effective teamwork. However, research about the fact that team learning processes emerge from conversations and the different forms this emergence can take is limited. The aim of this study is to determine whether the extent to which team members act on each other’s reasoning (transactivity) can be used to understand how team learning processes emerge. Research on teacher teams was used as the case study: Video recordings of three different teacher teams were used as primary data, and the data were analyzed using qualitative interaction analysis. The analysis shows that the content of team learning processes changes when team members act more closely on each other’s reasoning. In particular, team learning processes related to the storage and retrieval of information took place only in sequences in which team members acted closely on each other’s reasoning.’
