Last week, I attended a meeting of the Collaborative for Advancing Science Teaching and Learning in K–12. I serve on the steering committee, and this was our second large, in-person gathering with the full Collaborative. It was a mix of familiar faces and newer voices, and I found myself reflecting on how a group becomes a team.

Hat tip to the National Academies staff. It is clear they are putting thought and care into building more than just a network. They are building teams that can work together to take action.

Watching this group come together reminded me of Tuckman’s stages of group development: forming, storming, norming, and performing. The Collaborative is still early in its journey, somewhere in the forming and storming phases. These are the messy stages. People are still learning each other’s styles, perspectives, and rhythms. Questions get asked. Ideas get challenged. Tensions bubble up. They spill out in private conversations and direct challenges.

That’s the part that’s easy to want to skip.

We often feel pressure to jump straight into the work. It feels efficient and productive. But skipping over storming doesn’t make the tension disappear—it just sends it underground, where it can resurface later in more disruptive ways.

So how much disagreement is enough to move through storming? And what happens if a group doesn’t let that stage play out?

In my experience, it’s not about the volume of disagreement, it is about whether people feel heard, and whether differences get acknowledged and integrated. If a team is too polite to surface real tension, it can get stuck in a holding pattern that stalls it in forming or causes it to loop back into storming when it hits a roadblock. But if the group can navigate that tension constructively, it opens the door to trust, shared norms, and deeper collaboration.

That’s what I see emerging in this Collaborative. Members are learning how to listen to one another, how to make room for different priorities and viewpoints, and how to build something together. It’s not all smooth, but it is moving.

I’m looking forward to watching these teams continue to mature. The work ahead is important but so is the way we show up for one another as we do it.