Modeling Team-Development Lifecycle in Public Administration Courses

During the course of their academic experience, public administration students are expected to work as teams in order to complete projects and embrace a team-based philosophy for addressing public needs. Traditional team-development pedagogy omits a critical piece for future public administrators — developing team-development skills and competence through explicit reflection, modeling, and analysis of the team-development lifecycle. This paper demonstrates how modeling the team development lifecycle within a course setting — forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning (Tuckman, 1965; Tuckman & Jensen, 1977) — encourages students to explore the team-development process, and to experience and reflect on corresponding emotional and behavioral responses at the various team-development stages. By explicitly modeling the strategies in the context of an entire class serving as a single team, students develop a greater confidence and competence to engage future team-development opportunities. This article (a) articulates a strategy for how to model the team-development lifecycle in public administration courses, (b) identifies anticipated affective responses, and (c) offers examples of lessons learned, so that instructors can apply this pedagogical approach.