Practicing What We Preach

Abstract

The scientist-practitioner model, upon which many academic programs (including coursework on teams) are built, suggests that education should focus on more than just rote knowledge of a topic. The training literature also suggests that education must go beyond information to include demonstration, practice, and feedback. Accordingly, we suggest that educators teaching courses on teams should provide students not only with declarative knowledge regarding the science of teams, but also with practical experiences that will develop skilled team scientist-practitioners. We describe an example of how scientific team training was incorporated through experiential learning activities into a graduate-level psychology course on work teams. We conclude with a discussion of how this example represents an innovative approach to the pedagogy of teams, how our methods could be applied to other courses on small groups, and how to further the incorporation of validated team science into the classroom.