Developing an integrated curriculum-wide teamwork instructional strategy

Abstract

Graduating engineering students need many technical and professional skills to be successful in their careers, including those in communication and teamwork. The School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering (CBEE) at Oregon State University administers three undergraduate degree programs, and the curriculums have many courses, which incorporate teamwork and group activities (often multidisciplinary). However, until recently students did not receive targeted instruction in productive and inclusive teaming. To decrease student challenges with teamwork in their senior design courses and to produce competent and credible engineering graduates, we aim to incorporate teamwork knowledge and skill instruction into the curricula in a scaffolded, progressive manner. We have a unique opportunity given that our unit supports three disciplinary programs that have substantial overlapping curricula and has numerous opportunities for team activities at all course levels (first through fourth year), despite large class sizes. As a first step to enriching the curriculum with teaming instruction, modules and activities for the senior level lab and design courses have been implemented. Using evidence-based concepts and practices, the activities were designed to be directly relevant to the course material, designed to enrich, not simply amend, course content. All efforts were based upon a conceptual framework for teamwork knowledge, skills and functionality that moves the knowledge of teamwork into the practice of teamwork. The aim is for students to develop sustained practices in communication, inclusion, self-reflection, conflict management and team norming. Here we report progress of our efforts in the senior year, including discussion of assessment data, and end with a brief view towards the longer-range goal of stretching the teaming instruction across the four-year programs.