How Students See Themselves

Here's another post from early in my first TBL semester:
Michaelsen and others are adamant that practitioners of team-based learning allow students to participate in the formation of teams at the beginning of a semester (although they are just as adamant about instructors controlling team formation, doing much more than telling students to create groups of a certain number). Teams function best when they are diverse so that "member resources" (such as work experience, college experience, access to technology, varying perspectives, etc.) are distributed among the teams.
I asked my ENGL 1311 students to brainstorm a list of factors that affect team performance. One class came up with about a dozen factors. After a complicated vote, we had our top five factors: personality (extroverted/introverted) gender, age, race, and parenthood. I asked students to privately give themselves ten points for each category (e.g., 10 points if you are male, 10 points if you are over 21, etc.). The students stood in a line, with those having the highest scores at one end and those with the lowest at the other end (and yes, I explained that the points were not meant to assign value to one or the other gender, age range, etc.).  The students then counted off (1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 3, 4; etc.) and joined forces with those who had the same number.
I really didn't mean to get so bogged down in describing the details of the process. The point is that students did not form the groups themselves (which leads to groups that are too cohesive--friends stick together, for example, or the older nontraditional students find one another), and I did not form the groups myself (which makes students wonder what the instructor's ulterior motives are, even if the he or she explains the factors used to form diverse groups).
Of course the jury is still out on whether the teams are diverse enough to become lean, mean learning machines. But I can tell you that each team has exactly one male student.