Frequently Asked Questions
How do EnTeam tools and workshops encourage educators to use best practices?
EnTeam provides framegames – adaptable structures that educators can use to build educational experiences that are academically rigorous, socially engaging, and intellectually challenging. With EnTeam framegames, school becomes a collaborative experience for students and adults. When people measure their performance using the EnTeam scoreboards they learn to help each other put best practices into action. And the learning environment becomes more enjoyable and more productive.
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What is the role of an EnTeam facilitators?
EnTeam facilitators lead workshops but they do not do the work – facilitators serve as catalysts and help the educators create a culture of collaboration in the school and with the community. EnTeam facilitators make it easier for adults and students to work together.
The facilitators introduce the EnTeam score sheets that educators can use to measure cooperative performance. By measuring cooperation, students and teachers see their rate of progress in bringing out the best in others. The data on the score sheet gives people data that measures how well they are working together. EnTeam facilitators support by asking questions that people discover better ways to accomplish goals and learn collaboratively.
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What data does EnTeam generate?
Best practices in education are identified by their results as measured increase in academic achievement and improvement in student behavior. If a teaching strategy does not lift academic performance or improve behavior, then that strategy is not a best practice.
EnTeam scoreboards give a unique data set: they measure how much each individual contributes to the collaborative performance. When educators use EnTeam All-for-One score sheets, each student’s individual contribution to the collective performance is quantified.
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How do teachers use EnTeam data to raise academic achievement?
The data from EnTeam framegames gives teachers a measure of the performance of individual students in cooperative learning lessons.
EnTeam framegames overcome a common problem in cooperative learning and project-based learning: the free-rider problem. When one person does most of the work, the free-rider gets credit for the effort of a vigorous worker who may cover up the negligence of another student. When teachers use EnTeam scoreboards when students are working together, each individual’s contribution to the project is revealed.
By measuring individual contribution to collaborative projects, teachers can more accurately assess each student’s performance in cooperative learning situations. And the teacher is aided because the students can use the data from the score sheets to apply positive peer-pressure to students who are not working vigorously on the project.
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How does EnTeam frame games relate to best practices in education?
Best practices such as cooperative learning, project-based learning, peer-mentoring, and experiential education are enhanced by the process of EnTeam measuring cooperation. When educators and students have data on the individual performance they can test strategies for improving performance.
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Why do schools use EnTeam programs?
- Students become stronger socially and academically by learning to win together.
- EnTeam Workshops give educators educational games that encourage students to help each other make thoughtful choices, solve problems, and resolve conflicts as they learn.
- Measures of success:
- (1) improvement in students’ social-emotional skills and
- (2) increase in the pace of mastering the academic curriculum.
- Approach to learning: Students exert positive peer pressure on each other.
- Students strategize to improve what they learn and how they learn.
- Students build endurance that enables them to stay on task.
- The result: Students engage each other in learning. Therefore, academics improve.
- Measures of success:
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What happens in an EnTeam program?
- Educators use cooperative-learning structures in the form of games that challenge students to improve the scores they earn as they master learning objectives.
- Students strive to improve their scores in a series of short games.
- Between games, students reflect on what helps them learn.
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How much do EnTeam services cost?
We work within your budget. Here a few examples:
- Do-it-yourself — no charge to access EnTeam Games on the EnTeam website.
- Professional-development workshop: $900 for a collaborative-learning workshop for up to 20 educators. The workshop includes an EnTeam e-workbook for each educator.
- Bridge-building approach: $3,800 for a team of two to six educators to integrate their curricular content into academic games with the support of a facilitator.
- An EnTeam facilitator works with the educators to engage students in four collaborative-learning workshops.
- Students participate in the workshops because the workshops are an experiential-learning process for the educators.
- The educators may include classroom teachers, academic coaches, specialists, parents, counselors, librarians, PE coaches, mentors, after-school staff, etc.
- An EnTeam facilitator works with the educators to engage students in four collaborative-learning workshops.