100 freshman civil engineers: A model for integrating communication and teamwork in large engineering courses

Abstract

Engineering education has been transformed over the past decade. Increasingly, engineering students are seeing the integration of communication, teamwork, leadership, and ethics into their engineering curriculum. The best models are those that couple these professional skills with actual engineering projects to show students how intricately linked communication and teamwork skills are with engineering problem solving and design. Much emphasis is placed on senior capstone courses, as this meets the immediate demand of preparing graduating seniors for the non-technical aspects of their careers. In contrast, freshman classes receive less attention in terms of their position to "set the tone" for the coupling of communication and engineering, likely because the demands placed on freshman engineering classes are already high. They serve as a recruitment tool, pique interest in engineering, expose students to the many and varied areas of concentration in the discipline, and perhaps, introduce students to engineering projects and basic design skills. While the many and varied objectives of freshman classes already challenge the curriculum, increasing enrollment is another constraint. Unusually large freshman classes make intensive speaking and writing opportunities challenging in terms of evaluation and feedback. We have successfully integrated communication and interpersonal skill development into the freshman civil engineering class for several years. Despite many years of success with this course, we faced a unique challenge this year when enrollment increased by almost fifty percent. This increased number of students threatened to disrupt our already intensive instruction and evaluation processes. Our purpose in this paper is to showcase our unique approach to team teaching, illustrate the individualized attention students receive on their writing, speaking, and teamwork assignments, and provide an assessment of our approach. Specifically, we highlight our model of team teaching, and show how we capitalize on a unique class structure to allow for individualized communication experiences and feedback for all 100 students. Finally, we assess our efforts through gathering student feedback in the form of surveys, evaluating students' speaking and writing competence, and gathering feedback from the instructional team to guide continuous improvement in the course. © 2011 American Society for Engineering Education.