Teacher design teams as a strategy for professional development : the role of the facilitator

The goal of the current study was to explore the role and importance of the facilitator in Teacher Design Teams. The study took place in the context of a pre-service teacher education institution in Belgium, where teacher design teams were set up to facilitate the professional development of teacher educators. The findings from focus group discussions with team members and semi-structured interviews with facilitators confirm that the perceived importance of a facilitator depends on several factors, such as team characteristics and the design phase. Moreover, we found that a facilitator can fulfil three roles in a dynamic way: 1) providing logistic support, 2) scaffolding the design process and 3) monitoring the design process. The discussion centers on how these results can be used to support facilitators for successful Teacher Design Teams

Team-Based Competencies: Building a Shared Foundation for Education and Clinical Practice

Highlights discussions from a February 2011 conference on the need for collaborative health care, factors supporting and restraining change, and strategies for advancing interprofessional collaboration in education and practice

Science and Team Development

This paper explores a new idea about the future development of science and teams, and predicts its possible applications in science, education, workforce development and research. The inter-relatedness of science and teamwork developments suggests a growing importance of team facilitators’ quality, as well as the criticality of detailed studies of teamwork processes and team consortiums to address the increasing complexity of exponential knowledge growth and work interdependency. In the future, it will become much easier to produce a highly specialised workforce, such as brain surgeons or genome engineers, than to identify, educate and develop individuals capable of the delicate and complex work of multi-team facilitation. Such individuals will become the new scientists of the millennium, having extraordinary knowledge in variety of scientific fields, unusual mix of abilities, possessing highly developed interpersonal and teamwork skills, and visionary ideas in illuminating bold strategies for new scientific discoveries. The new scientists of the millennium, through team consortium facilitation, will be able to build bridges between the multitude of diverse and extremely specialised knowledge and interdependent functions to improve systems for the further benefit of mankind