The Five Stages of Team Development in Educational Institutions

When a group of teachers joins a new department, or when faculty members are brought together to lead a curriculum reform initiative, they don’t immediately function as a cohesive unit. They start as individuals – with different teaching philosophies, communication styles, and professional habits. The journey from a group of individuals to a high-performing team follows a remarkably predictable path. Bruce Tuckman’s model of team development, first introduced in 1965, maps this journey across five stages: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Transforming. Understanding these stages is especially valuable in educational institutions, where effective teamwork directly shapes the quality of student learning.

Where Tuckman’s model comes from 🔗

Bruce Tuckman, an educational psychologist, developed his team development framework after reviewing fifty published studies on group dynamics. He identified that teams, regardless of their purpose or context, move through a consistent set of developmental phases. His original model had four stages; a fifth – Adjourning, often reframed in educational contexts as Transforming – was added later. As noted by researchers in management education, these stages are all necessary and inevitable for a team to grow, tackle problems, and deliver results. For teachers and academic leaders, this model offers a clear framework to diagnose where their team stands and what it needs to move forward.

Stage 1: Forming – orientation and role establishment 🔗

The forming stage is the starting point. A new team comes together – whether it’s a newly constituted department, a curriculum committee, or a cross-disciplinary faculty group. At this stage, uncertainty is high and members are primarily focused on understanding their own place within the group. People are asking questions like: What is expected of me? Who leads here? How will decisions be made?

Interactions tend to be polite but cautious. Team members rely heavily on formal structures and look to whoever holds authority – a department head, a dean, or a project lead – for guidance. In a school context, this could mean a group of newly assigned teachers who are professionally courteous with each other but haven’t yet established genuine working relationships. While performance is initially limited at this stage, it’s a necessary foundation. The forming stage sets the tone for everything that follows.

What educational teams should focus on during forming 🔗

Leaders play a critical role here. Clear communication about team goals, roles, and processes can significantly shorten the uncertainty of this stage. In educational settings, this means clearly defining what the team is working toward – whether it’s improving student outcomes, designing a new curriculum, or implementing an institutional policy – and establishing a shared understanding of how the group will operate. A shared vision and sense of goals gives individual members a reason to invest in the team beyond their personal responsibilities.

Stage 2: Storming – overcoming conflict and challenge 🔗

Once the initial politeness fades, teams enter the storming stage – arguably the most difficult and consequential of all five stages. This is when individual personalities surface, differences in opinion become visible, and conflict begins to emerge. Members may express frustration about team goals, leadership decisions, or the direction of shared work. In some cases, subgroups form around shared preferences or personalities.

In an educational institution, storming can look like a disagreement between faculty members over teaching methodology, a clash between senior and junior staff about how student assessments should be structured, or tension over who holds decision-making authority in a departmental meeting. These conflicts, while uncomfortable, are a sign that team members are genuinely engaging with each other rather than performing surface-level cooperation.

Why storming is essential, not optional 🔗

Teams that skip this phase – or suppress conflict in the name of harmony – often stall later. The discomfort of storming is what forces teams to clarify roles, re-examine goals, and establish more honest working norms. Research shows that only about half of teams in Tuckman’s original studies showed a clear storming phase; some moved directly from forming to norming. But teams that avoid conflict often remain stuck in superficial collaboration, unable to reach their full potential. For educational leaders, the key is to engage with disagreement constructively – encourage open dialogue, address conflicts early, and help the team refocus on shared goals rather than individual positions.

Stage 3: Norming – building team culture and shared understanding 🔗

When teams work through the conflicts of the storming stage, they enter a period of norming. This is when the team begins to establish a shared culture – agreed-upon norms, clearer roles, and more consistent ways of working together. Members shift their energy toward the team’s goals and show a noticeable increase in productivity, both individually and collectively.

In an educational team, norming is visible when teachers begin sharing lesson plans without being asked, when department meetings shift from procedural disputes to substantive discussions about pedagogy, and when members actively support each other’s professional development. Trust builds. Communication becomes more direct and less guarded. The team starts to feel like more than the sum of its parts.

The risk of stopping at norming 🔗

One important caution: many teams stop here. Having survived the turbulence of storming and found a comfortable working rhythm, they settle for “good enough.” Fear of revisiting conflict, over-reliance on the team leader, and a lack of ambition to push further can all keep a team at the norming level indefinitely. For educational teams, this can mean collaboration that feels productive on the surface – regular meetings, shared documents, collegial relationships – but doesn’t actually translate into improved student outcomes or institutional growth. Moving from norming to performing requires a deliberate push.

Stage 4: Performing – achieving synergy and efficiency 🔗

The performing stage is where teams reach their highest level of functioning. In this stage, teams work with a positive and creative attitude to achieve goals. Members are confident in their own abilities and those of their teammates. They can work independently, in subgroups, or as a whole unit with equal effectiveness. Importantly, the need for direct supervision diminishes – the team self-regulates.

This stage is significant precisely because not all teams reach it. True interdependence is the norm at this stage, with team members adapting fluidly to meet each other’s needs. In educational institutions, a performing team might look like a faculty group that collectively redesigns a curriculum unit, draws on each member’s subject expertise, manages its own timeline, and reviews student data together to measure impact – all with minimal external direction.

What defines a performing educational team 🔗

High-performing teacher teams answer four critical questions together: What do we want students to learn? What instructional strategies will we use? How will we know if students are learning? And how will we respond when they are not? These questions, drawn from Professional Learning Community frameworks, represent a team that has moved well beyond coordination and into genuine collective accountability. When school and district leaders support this kind of collaboration – by honoring meeting time, providing resources, and participating as instructional champions – collective teacher efficacy becomes a real and measurable force.

Stage 5: Transforming – how successful teams evolve 🔗

The final stage of team development is called Adjourning in Tuckman’s original model, but in educational contexts, it is more usefully understood as Transforming. Rather than simply marking the end of a team, this stage describes what happens when a high-performing team evolves – adapting to new challenges, influencing the wider institution, and contributing to a larger mission beyond its immediate scope.

The Teacher-Powered Schools initiative captures this idea well: teams that have reached this stage are not just managing their own schools effectively – they are becoming transforming forces in teaching and learning more broadly, contributing to conversations about student achievement, educational equity, and systemic innovation at local, state, and national levels. In institutional terms, a transforming team might mentor newer teams, lead professional development for the wider faculty, spearhead policy reform within the institution, or document their collaborative practices for others to learn from.

Transformation as an institutional responsibility 🔗

A key insight from recent research on educational teams is that individual team success rarely translates into institutional change on its own. Teams that reach the performing stage need to be supported in extending their impact – sharing models of collaboration, surfacing best practices, and contributing to a school-wide culture of learning. This requires institutional structures that recognize and reward collaborative achievement, not just individual performance. Research on team-based professional development in higher education reinforces that when universities and schools provide recognition for team efforts and create incentives for collaborative work, the conditions for transformational team impact are far stronger.

Teams don’t always move in a straight line 🔗

One of the most important practical insights from Tuckman’s model is that team development is rarely linear. Even teams that have reached the performing stage can revert to earlier stages – particularly when a new member joins, when leadership changes, or when the team faces an unfamiliar challenge. A faculty team that has been performing well may slide back into storming after a major curriculum overhaul or an administrative restructuring. This is normal, and recognizing it early allows leaders and team members to respond with the right strategies rather than assuming the team has failed.

The practical implication for educational institutions is clear: team development requires sustained attention, not a one-time intervention. Building a culture of genuine collaboration – one that reduces teacher isolation, fosters collegiality, and leads to greater insights about teaching and learning – is an ongoing leadership responsibility, not a programme that ends after an annual team-building workshop.

What do you think? Reflecting on the teams you have been part of in an educational setting – which stage do you think most school teams get stuck in, and what would it take to move them forward? And how might institutional structures in your school better support teams to move from norming into genuine, high-impact performance?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman%27s_stages_of_group_development
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4215500/
3. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-principlesmanagement/chapter/reading-the-five-stages-of-team-development/
4. https://www.mindtools.com/abyj5fi/forming-storming-norming-and-performing/
5. https://www.amle.org/building-teacher-collaboration-school-wide/
6. https://hr.mit.edu/learning-topics/teams/articles/stages-development
7. https://www.bitesizelearning.co.uk/resources/tuckman-stages-team-development-forming-norming-storming-performing
8. https://www.wcupa.edu/coral/tuckmanStagesGroupDelvelopment.aspx
9. https://www.intellispark.com/blog/fostering-teacher-teamwork-the-essential-bridge-between-knowing-and-doing
10. https://www.ascd.org/blogs/4-steps-for-creating-stronger-more-collaborative-teacher-teams
11. https://www.teacherpowered.org/guide/about/stages
12. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2024.1446905/full
13. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5613810/
14. https://www.athleteassessments.com/stages-of-team-development-in-sport/