EnTeam Blog
How can different sides win together?
Although the most common way to win is a contest in which one side can win only if the other side loses, there is another contest in which both sides lose or both sides win.When your goal is to improve your performance, the standard of excellence is your previous performance. [...]
EnTeam Games: if we can’t win together — everyone loses together
Compare two problems: If you see a young child playing with a sharp knife or pulling a cat’s tail, what can you do to redirect the child? If your friend has bought into a bogus conspiracy theory, what can you do to redirect this friend to a more complete picture [...]
New Scoreboard for Scoring Cooperation
Where is the scoreboard for win-win contests? Popular culture abounds with scoreboards for measuring win-lose contests. How many methods of scoring win-lose contests can you think of in sports, debates, elections, lawsuits, business, education? All scoreboards that measure performance in win-lose contests share one feature: you can’t have a winner [...]
Short-term cheating replaced with long-term honesty
A question from Tom Evans: Have held discussions with leading experts in agile programming across St. Louis over the last year. The question I always come to that they cannot seem to answer is “how can we measure cooperation in agile teams?” Or more specifically, what is the metric with [...]
Cooperation in Class Over Time
Cooperation in Class: Part I Measuring cooperation is obvious and accurate with the EnTeam process. When playing EnTeam’s Talking Dominoes with a class of high school seniors, a lack of cooperation was witnessed by all students. In one group of four students, two were the “socially alpha” students, and two [...]
In Response to September 11: Uniting Communities
September 11, 2001 was a tragic event for our nation. It left us with many questions about our role as a nation and a community. In response to the event, how did we react? Unfortunately, there was anti-Muslim rhetoric and fear mongering in the media shortly after the 11th of [...]
HOT Bowl in Ferguson: Finding Common Ground
Working with just over 100 students from Ferguson, St. Louis City, and Webster Groves, Missouri, all parties involved knew there were underlying prejudices to be addressed. I am in the business of measuring cooperation. We bring diverse groups of people together in "Higher-Order Thinking Bowls" and help them learn to [...]
Check out the View! How to Land an Educational High: Debrief
Students love experiencing new views of their subjects. When they reach a new vantage point and find their footing (get comfortable with the process) they ask for more. Gamification and collaboration open the door to new perspectives and help students soar. How do we enjoy the experience and let students [...]
Get Messy! 3 steps for deeper learning
Einstein working at a messy desk EnTeam games are set up with multiple routes to the answer. Rather than a traditional lecture-based classroom format, EnTeam measures cooperation in collaborative games. Open-ended questions are asked of students that force them to innovate, strategize, assess their progress, and then try [...]
Honest Achievements: A Moral Discussion with Teachers
Moral discussions With sincerity, one teacher shouted “Let’s all set low standards!” in a recent professional development workshop. We were playing House of Cards, a simple, but powerful EnTeam concept game focused on creative thinking. Teammates are given index cards and instructed to build the tallest tower possible. [...]
Workshop at UMSL
Doctoral students at University of Missouri St. Louis explored the process of measuring cooperative performance by playing EnTeam games. Building on the work of Johnson, Johnson and Holubec, we explored how cooperative learning involves positive interdependence, face-to-face pro-motive interaction, individual and group accountability, interpersonal and small group skills, and group processing. In [...]
Improved Engagement, Better Behavior, and Higher Scores
A Science Teacher Shares Her Experience with EnTeam Games Renee Ganley has been teaching for over 10 years, and has just completed her sixth year as a science teacher at Busch Middle School in St. Louis. She first learned about the EnTeam approach to cooperative learning when Ted Wohlfarth ran [...]
Summer Transitioning Program
Summer is finally here, and you know what that means: summer school! Vacation will have to wait, but on the bright side, exciting new changes are happening with the High School Graduation Initiative summer transition program. At the beginning of this month, a group of social workers at Check and [...]
Why “EnTeam”?
EnTeam means learning to win together-- in other words, learning to reach goals on a win-win basis. I am often asked how we came up with the name "EnTeam." EnTeam is all about carefully examining definitions to words we use regularly but sometimes neglect to think about deeply. For example, [...]
What does it mean to win?
General David Petraeus defined winning in a radically different way than past generals: Winning is achieving your objectives. (Petraeus, 2010) Although Petraeus is talking about how to win a war with the Taliban in Afghanistan, he is making a point that relates to many challenges in life: We win when we [...]