We have used the technique in freshmen, sophomore and junior level classes. In junior classes, we have used both lightweight teams and project teams. So student A may be on a lightweight team with students b, c, and d, but then on a project team with students m, s and t. They can try an activity in their lightweight team, then use that skill in their project team. We think that students in lightweight teams practice communication skills so much, and this scaffolds their team-work skills for higher-level courses that have more medium-weight or heavy-weight teams.

Our motivation was encountering many students in upper year courses who didn’t seem to know how to program, and who seemed to hate programming. There is literature that shows students’ brain activity is lower during powerpoint lectures than during sleep. The flipped class structure gives everyone the time and space to actively engage with the material, and to get help and feedback from peers, TAs and professors in the classroom when they don’t understand something. They can also watch content video at home as often as needed, at whatever speed needed.

That’s helpful to know. Thanks Celine!

Detailed elements:
- Split students into teams before the semester starts.
- Create a seating plan, so teams sit together.
- Have students do prep work prior to class
- Create active learning activities in class that require students to discuss and work together
- Make sure the activities they do in class are worth very little of the final grade, so there is no stress if a particular team member doesn’t contribute on a given day
- Keep the classroom environment positive and challenging
- Don’t require teams to meet outside of class.

Lightweight refers to the fact that there isn’t a big grade associated with the team’s efforts. I like it, but am open to suggestions…

We have been doing lightweight teams in flipped intro CS classes since 2013. There have been 3 different faculty involved in teaching these two intro programming courses (myself, Bruce Long and more recently, Manuel Perez Quinones). Other faculty at UNC Charlotte also use this technique in intro web programming, in HCI classes and it is being used in Database classes and a few graduate classes as well. So, many students at our institution have experienced this, and many undergrad students have now experienced this structure of flipped class with lightweight teams multiple different times. We believe it is starting to change their expectations of what higher education should be and what their role is in their own learning.

As for roles on teams, we don’t assign roles, but let that emerge organically. Because the teams are lightweight and aren’t about doing a big project or assignment, there often doesn’t need to be a team leader per se.

Yep, absolutely impossible to tease out which part made the difference in improving performance in the follow-up course – it’s likely a combination of all of these things. These things all work together in a pretty-tightly integrated way (although the teams and flipped classroom could be done without MediaComp, and without gamification). In future semesters we are hoping to have flipped lightweight teams classes for intro CS sections without MediaComp so that we can compare, and tease these factors out.

For now, the fact that our students self-report high levels of engagement and report liking being on the teams gives us some suggestion that the lightweight teams is a core factor at work.

We haven’t tried lightweight teams in other environments, but I’d certainly be interested in doing that! Great idea!

Thank you for your reply, Dr. Latuipe. We have an intergenerational Town Hall meeting that connects university students in grassroots political involvement with 5 generations of voters to draft recommendations for our state legislature. The team activities in your video reminded me of the relationship-building activities our 5 generations of participants do together… I am going to continue to learn more about lightweight teams—perhaps there are indeed exciting connections!

We don’t have team projects in this class, but what we have observed is that these teams often become long-term friend groups. We have observed groups of students that we randomly put together into lightweight teams hanging out together socially on campus a year or two after they were first put together. We also see these students opting to work with each other in group projects in other classes.

Yes, absolutely. There is about a one-hour time cost up front to put students into groups and create a seating plan, but there isn’t really any other cost to this at all. I think the trick to this is that we are reducing social anxiety and letting students work socially. They want to socialize anyway, and we give them a structure in which to do it. We’ve done it in active learning classrooms (which work great, but are expensive to build), but we’ve also done it in regular stadium-type classrooms or rectangular classes with rows of desks.