1.2 Students Working In Teams

Self-Assessment: Prepared 

Over the past three years, Wellcome Middle School has established consistent, structured teamwork as a schoolwide instructional expectation, meeting the Prepared-level requirement that students work in teams at least once per week in at least 75% of classes. Collaboration, once concentrated primarily in science and STEM challenges, is now embedded across all core content areas and electives, including math, ELA, social studies, AVID, health/PE, arts, CTE, and Encore courses. This shift has been supported by the AVID WICOR framework, the WMS Learning Focused/AVID lesson plan template, and a schoolwide STEM Instruction Checklist, all of which require intentional planning for student collaboration.

Teacher survey data confirm this level of implementation: 60% of teachers report that students work in teams multiple times per week, with only 40% indicating occasional collaboration. This data was collected for the entire staff, including non-STEM teachers, and of the 60% who have students work in teams multiple times per week, 100% of STEM teachers are represented.  Team-based learning is evident across disciplines, including math problem-solving and data investigations, ELA literature circles and peer review, social studies inquiry tasks and simulations, AVID tutorials and Socratic seminars, and applied collaborative work in CTE, arts, PE, and STEM Encore courses.

To ensure that teamwork is purposeful and accountable, teachers across content areas use clearly defined individual and group expectations. Common structures include assigned team roles (such as Captain, Recorder, Timekeeper, and Materials Manager), written expectations for collaborative tasks, and shared routines introduced during instructional time and reinforced in AVID classes. These structures provide consistency while allowing flexibility for discipline-specific applications, such as data teams in math, rotating discussion roles in ELA, investigation teams in social studies and science, and design or performance teams in arts, CTE, PE, and STEM Encore.

Teachers also consistently support student teams, another key requirement at the Prepared level. Across disciplines, teachers actively circulate to coach teams, model effective communication, scaffold collaboration with sentence stems and checklists, support productive struggle, and facilitate reflection on team participation and outcomes. 

As a result, teamwork/collaboration is now a routine instructional practice across grades and subjects, with teachers reporting improvements in student communication, peer-to-peer problem solving, shared responsibility, engagement, and the overall quality of group products. These practices are documented consistently through lesson plans, student work samples, and STEM and interdisciplinary project artifacts, demonstrating sustained implementation at the Prepared level for Indicator 1.2.

WICOR

At Wellcome Middle School, all teachers are still expected to complete lesson plans weekly using the Learning Focused format with WICOR included. The WICOR strategies are W - Writing, I - Inquiry, C - Collaboration, O - Organization, and R - Reading. The collaboration strategy should be used weekly in all classrooms. 

During the 22-23 school year, our Makerspace/STEM Science class held a STEM Expo at the end of the semester. Students worked in teams to complete a presentation representing all they worked on during the semester. They selected digital technology such as Flip, Green Screen, Adobe Spark, etc. The STEM Expo was in the media center so that they could have teachers and students come and provide feedback on their presentations using the criteria for success rubric. The STEM Expo has now evolved to an annual Career Fair during the school day which has grown so large it is now held in the gym. You will also see evidence of this in 1.5.