Step 01
Students complete a working-style survey.
Students answer a short instrument about how they work, communicate, solve problems, and contribute. Designed to take under ten minutes.
Faculty Access · Beta
For faculty teaching team-based courses.
Cohort forms balanced student teams from your roster — then shows you how each team is configured to work, where they’re drifting, and where one student may be carrying the load.
Approved faculty can use Cohort free during our beta.
Why this exists
You can’t fix what you can’t see inside the team.
You assign the teams. You watch them. By week three, you can usually tell something’s off — a quiet drift, an uneven load, a student you suspect is carrying more than their share. By the time you can name it, the deadline is close enough that the team can’t recover. Cohort gives faculty a team-level view of fit, friction, and balance — without reducing students to personality labels or individual scores.
What faculty get
A team-level read on every team in your class.
01
Team formation that’s actually balanced.
Upload your class roster. Cohort uses configuration fit — not personality types — to build teams that complement across strengths, working style, rhythm, and load.
02
A Team Configuration Report™ for every team you form.
Once teams are set, each gets a report: where they’re strong, where load may concentrate, and what to do about it.
03
An overview of every team in your class.
Catch the team that’s drifting before the deadline gets close.
04
Direct support during the beta.
Office hours with Jessica and the Cohort team. Your feedback shapes what ships next.
How teams are formed
Formation is the first lever.
Before students start a project, Cohort helps instructors form teams from a short working-style survey — so groups are balanced for the work, not just based on who already knows each other or happens to sit nearby.
Step 02
Mapped to how each student works.
Cohort maps each student’s working style — not personality types or skill labels, but patterns in how they tend to contribute, communicate, and coordinate.
Step 03
Teams are formed for coordination balance.
Cohort compares possible team configurations and recommends groups balanced across working styles, contribution patterns, and workload risk — not random assignment or self-selection.
Step 04
You review and adjust before teams go live.
Every formation is a draft. Instructors can approve, swap, hold, or override suggested teams. Cohort shows how each change affects the balance, so final decisions stay in your hands.
As the work unfolds
Step 05 · ongoing
Check-ins show whether the configuration is holding.
Once the project starts, brief team-level check-ins show whether the configuration is working as intended — and surface drift while there is still time to act.
How roles work Coming Fall 2026
Every student leads something.
Cohort doesn’t just form balanced teams — it gives every member a leadership role matched to their teamwork strengths. Five roles, five domains of ownership. Nobody is support staff.
- Team Lead keeps the team organized, coordinated, and accountable
- Project Lead manages the timeline so the work finishes on time
- Quality Assurance Lead ensures the work meets the project requirements
- Engagement & Inclusion Lead ensures active participation, start to finish
- Decision Governance Lead designs fair decisions and resolves disagreements early
Roles define how each member contributes to the team’s functioning — in addition to, not instead of, the project work. Teams of 3 and 4 keep full leadership coverage through combined roles.
Read the full role responsibilities
Five-person teams
- Team Lead
- You organize and lead team meetings, prepare meeting agendas, take meeting minutes, and communicate the team’s next steps. You also liaise and coordinate with the other team leads to keep leadership activities aligned, monitor completion of team action items, and identify issues that require collaboration across leadership roles. Your primary focus is keeping the team members organized, coordinated, and accountable.
- Project Lead
- You manage the project timeline by creating a project schedule and monitoring progress throughout the project. At the onset, divide the project work into manageable parts, document each member’s selected part, establish deadlines for the tasks needed to complete each part, and collect regular status updates to identify delays early. Your primary focus is managing the project to ensure it is completed on time.
- Quality Assurance Lead
- You evaluate team members’ work throughout the project against the project requirements to identify mistakes or misunderstandings before they affect the team’s work. Confirm the team is interpreting the project requirements correctly and serve as the team’s point of contact with the professor for project-related questions and clarifications. Your primary focus is ensuring the team’s work meets the project requirements.
- Engagement & Inclusion Lead
- You create an inclusive environment where all members are engaged. Promote balanced participation by inviting all members into discussions, preventing dominant voices, and meeting with disengaged members or those needing support. Solicit confidential feedback on workload equity and engagement, and address concerns early. Your primary focus is ensuring active participation throughout the project.
- Decision Governance Lead
- You ensure the team makes fair decisions and resolve disagreements. At the onset, develop a process for how the team will make routine decisions. If disagreements arise that cannot be resolved through this agreed-upon process, meet separately with the involved members and guide them toward a solution everyone supports. Your primary focus is preventing and resolving conflicts before they affect the team’s progress.
Four-person teams
Team Lead, Project Lead, and Quality Assurance Lead as above. The fourth role combines engagement with conflict resolution.
- Engagement & Inclusion Lead
- You create an inclusive environment that encourages engagement and constructive conflict resolution. Promote balanced participation by inviting all members into discussions and connecting with disengaged members. At the onset, establish a team decision process. If disagreements arise, mediate until consensus is reached. Your primary focus is ensuring participation and preventing conflicts from affecting team progress.
What your class will see
Once a team is formed, this is what you’ll see.
A Team Configuration Report for each project team — plus a pattern label that names what the configuration tells you.
Sample Team Configuration Report
The Tentpole Pattern
The team is moving, but the load is uneven.
One member is absorbing too much of the coordination burden. The team may perform well early, but pressure is concentrating around a single point.
What to do
Clarify ownership before the strongest contributor becomes the bottleneck.
Sample shown: The Tentpole Pattern. You’ll also see patterns like Parallel Play, Harmony, and Spark across your class.
Illustrative sample data. The numbers shown are a design example, not a real team’s results.
Getting started
From roster to working team.
- 01
Upload the roster.
Start with the students already enrolled in your course.
- 02
Invitations go out by email.
Each student receives a private link to a short behavioral survey. No apps, no QR codes.
- 03
Review the proposed teams.
Cohort forms balanced teams and assigns each member a leadership role. You stay in control of the final roster.
- 04
Teams hold their first meeting.
Members review, edit, and sign their pre-drafted charter together.
- 05
The work becomes visible.
Cohort flags early coordination risk and gives you a clearer place to begin the conversation.
Coming Fall 2026
Leadership work students can carry forward.
Students who complete the Cohort process receive a named, shareable completion certificate recognizing the leadership responsibility they practiced — designed for LinkedIn, without turning teamwork into a personality label or a public score.
Early classroom use
Mid-term survey results from the Spring 2026 beta showed strong student response: 96% reported clear team roles, 4.83/5 average psychological safety, 4.82/5 average team goal clarity. Seven university sections measured.
Why this exists
Why Cohort exists
Cohort is built by working professors and technologists who kept watching faculty assign team projects without a clear way to see what was happening inside those teams. By the time the issues surfaced — the load imbalance, the quiet drift, the disengaged member — the deadline was too close.
Cohort is what they wished they had. A way to see how each team is configured, not just who’s on it. Where the load is concentrating. Where coordination is breaking down. Whether the pattern of work is set up to actually deliver.
Faculty Access applications are reviewed by the Cohort team. If you teach team-based courses, we’d like to hear from you.
Approval process
Reviewed by hand. No automated approvals.
Applications are reviewed by the Cohort team. Most qualified faculty hear back within a few days. If you’re approved, we’ll send a short onboarding call link to get your class wired up.
Apply
Tell us about your course.
FAQ
Before you commit.
What does it cost?
Free for approved faculty during our beta.
Who’s eligible?
Faculty teaching team-based courses at accredited colleges and universities.
How long does setup take?
About 15 minutes to onboard a class. Students complete a 10-minute assessment on their own time.
What if my class is already underway?
Cohort works mid-stream. You can configure existing teams or form new ones.
Does it integrate with my LMS?
Not yet. Cohort is web-based and works alongside Canvas, Blackboard, or whatever you use. No IT setup required.
What happens to individual student data?
Individual responses stay private. You see team-level patterns only — never raw individual answers.
Do I need IRB approval?
Classroom use of Cohort is typically treated like any other instructional tool, but your institution’s IRB office makes that determination — check with them.
Is a student’s role their job on the project?
No. The role is how they help the team run — the project work gets divided by the team in the first meeting, and everyone carries a share of the deliverable.
Can students swap roles?
Teams can adjust in their charter conversation. The assignment is a starting point built from their survey, not a verdict.
What do I see as the instructor?
Team composition, charter status, and early risk signals. You never see individual survey scores — and students never see numbers either. No scores, no rankings, anywhere.