Designing student build teams, for Reclaim Open 2025

For several years, I’ve been assigning collaborative assignments to small groups of students where each member of the team has a common role and unique role. The class where I use this model most explicitly, WRIT 3152: Digital Community Engagement, has become a service learning class in which students serve as digital strategy consultants for community partners. (I teach a second version of the class in the spring months that focuses on something completely different.) While the class is part of our Professional Writing program in the English Department, it draws on an interdisciplinary approach to teaching the web that involves computer science, marketing, design, and organizational leadership. I enjoy the fact that students can chart their way through the course gaining experience in different roles but on a unique learning path from other students.

I learned the term “build team” from 48in48, a non profit organization in Atlanta that schedules several hackathons per year in which volunteers build free websites for 48 other non profits in 48 hours. 48in48 structures its volunteers (mostly people in the tech industry) into build teams where team members serve as either the project manager, content developer, WordPress designer, or UI/UX specialist. I’ve adapted these roles to the build team concept in my class. Sometimes the roles change to highlight different skills, but typically team members have the option to serve as a project manager, a researcher, a designer, or an editor, the understanding that everyone on the team is also a writer. I’ll offer a breakdown of these roles here and some things that I’ve learned that help students in this environment transition from hating “group work” to learning the concrete skills of collaboration.

Project management: Organizing a team, facilitating conversation, steering a group toward consensus, and keeping people accountable with deadlines — all of these are unique skills that I find some English and Communications majors in my class have in abundance. Sometimes, they have not been invited to use them in our classes. When I give a student the PM role, I am telling them that I have confidence in their ability to lead and assist.

Researcher: In a web-based project, everything is research and curiosity. The researcher on a team should be the person with the license to go down every rabbit hole and gather the most eclectic sources. I stress to students that the researcher job is one that someone can too easily “pretend” to be working, so I always want researchers coming back to their team with citations, annotations, and lists of sources that are beyond what the team needs (so that writers can choose from a wide range of material).

Designer: In my teams, this is the “WordPress” person, and I want to see them learn something new: apply a new theme or plug in, use a new design element, embed media in a new and interesting way. The designer is the person that collects all of the text, image, and web media in order to build the deliverable (a report, a white paper, etc.) to assignment specifications.

Editor: Someone always needs to be the last set of eyes. The best editors can focus on both language and functionality in a finished project. I always prefer an editor to working on text that they did not originate so that the omissions are gaps are clearer. That also means that, because the editor is also a writer, that someone else will need to edit their work.

Other things I have learned constructing, dissolving, encouraging, and sometimes rehab’ing build teams over the years:

• Student choice works well but can also tank a project. I want there to be a healthy amount of student choice and my guidance in assigning build teams. I survey students before a project to find out their preference on team members, roles, content (often times that means: what community partner they work with), and time availability. After I get to learn everyone’s strengths, I usually assemble the team from the survey data. I also choose the PM. After that, the team makes the rest of the decisions themselves.
• All of the projects my students work on are built in WordPress. I have usually required students to purchase self-hosted domains, but this semester I am exploring a Reclaim Domain that I’ve installed a multisite WordPress instance on, splitting off separate sites for each student.
• It’s always best to let students see what build teams look like outside the classroom. I encourage students to volunteer for a 48in48 hackathon, and when they do, I give them time in class to describe the environment. Volunteering alongside tech industry professionals gives my students valuable exposure to values and skill-sets necessary for collaboration in digital careers.
• Flexibility is important. Sometimes teams burn out, lose a member, or go off the rails. I give students a “failure is a learning moment” speech every semester, to try to inoculate them from the panic that sets in for some students when a project does not go exactly the way that they wanted it to. I encourage them to look at every collaborative project (I usually do around four) is an opportunity to learn a new skill in community with other people, and that sometimes that skill is supporting other team members through challenges.