Prioritizing Teamwork: Promoting Process And Product Effectiveness In The Freshman Engineering Design Course

Twenty-first century engineers face complex challenges that demand collaborative problem solving. However, traditional engineering education does not sufficiently prepare students for the profession. The call for instruction in such skills as communication and teamwork is not new; ABET and industrial boards have argued for inclusion of these topics in engineering education for many years. Yet, engineering programs continue to struggle with the development of best practices for teaching communication and teamwork principles that are contextual, meaningful, and applicable. The purpose of this paper is to highlight a curricular revision that foregrounds teamwork instruction in a freshman Introduction to Robotic Systems Design course. First, we highlight our approach to teamwork instruction to prepare students to be effective interpersonal communicators and collaborative writers. Next, we assess our efforts through (a) student feedback via course evaluations, comparing this year’s data with last year’s; (b) students’ peer evaluations; (c) students’ team progress reports, assessing collaborative writing skills; and (d) feedback from the instructional team guiding continuous improvement in the course. Background Collaboration and communication impact engineering practice in profound ways. Engineers need to be creative, innovative problem solvers, often under time constraints. As a result, effective teamwork and communication are paramount. To equip students with the teamwork and communication skills necessary for engineering practice, educators have developed various approaches including writing across the curriculum, cooperative project-based learning, and integrated communication instruction. For more than ten years, we have integrated teamwork and communication (oral and written) instruction into the freshman and senior Mechanical Engineering design classes, relying on graduate students from Communication and English to provide instruction. Our model, however, is not without flaws. For example, freshman often feel overwhelmed with the workload in the introductory course, since they are learning computer programs, design principles, oral and written communication, and teamwork skills. Additionally, limited instruction in design, teamwork, or communication is incorporated into the sophomore or junior classes. As a result, we developed an integrated Student-driven Pedagogy of Integrated, Reinforced, Active Learning (SPIRAL) curriculum 1 and implemented it in Fall 2009. The redesign distributes and integrates computational, design, and professional (teamwork and communication) skills throughout four courses comprising the mechanical engineering core in the freshman and sophomore years, building through the junior year, and culminating in the senior capstone course (see Appendix A for an overview of the Mechanical Engineering students’ core curriculum). Now, we can prioritize aspects of teamwork and communication (oral and written) instruction in each course to minimize information overload for the students, while at the same time, instilling the importance of these professional skills to engineering practice. ME 1000 is a freshman design course where student teams design and build a device that must traverse an obstacle course. Feedback from students, as well as evaluations of final products (designs, papers, presentations) prior to Fall 2009 pointed to various teamwork deficiencies. P ge 15979.2 Specifically, we found that student teams typically approached their work from a “divide and conquer” mentality. That is, the workload was distributed among team members who rarely communicated except at the end of the semester when they had to “put all the pieces together.” The result was often a disjointed presentation and report, as well as a device that performed poorly during the competition. In other words, team communication impacted their product. As a result, the curriculum redesign prioritizes teamwork instruction in the introductory course to minimize poor communication and maximize (team) efficiency and (design) effectiveness. The primary focus of ME 1000 is teamwork and how teamwork is vitally important to all components of the course, specifically a larger semester-length project, collaborative writing, and oral presentations. In order to be successful, teams must accept and encourage the teamwork process. To reinforce this notion in the classroom, teamwork is used as a common thread throughout writing, oral communication, and engineering lectures and activities. Our goal was to effectively incorporate teamwork, writing, and oral communication into the freshman mechanical engineering classroom. The curricular changes are intended to provide freshman-engineering students with a teamwork foundation to prepare them for their roles as engineers. As a result, teamwork is spotlighted in terms of its relation to all class components (i.e., design, writing, presentations) in order to reinforce the importance of collaboration to engineering. To determine the effectiveness of these changes, we solicited both student and instructor feedback. Teamwork and Engineering The field of engineering demands collaboration to innovatively solve today’s complex problems. Gone are the days of working alone in a lab. Today’s engineer needs to be able to function as a productive team member, and to accomplish this objective, the engineer needs to be a competent communicator. As a result, much of the focus of communication instruction within the engineering disciplines emphasizes effective informal communication within teams. In fact, teaming has received greater emphasis in the engineering education literature recently. 1 Engineering teaming research, in general, encompasses the following areas: (a) cooperative learning, 2-10 (b) specific examples of using teams in the classroom, 11-15 (c) the impact of gender (and other demographic variables) on team productivity, 16-18 (d) essential team skills, 19-23 and (e) approaches for assessing teamwork (i.e., grading or evaluating team projects). 24-29 Although this literature is a valuable resource for instructors of teamwork, it fails to address team pedagogy. That is, of the essays that afford mention of team communication as an important aspect of effective professional development, none go on to explain how to teach students effective teamwork principles for the benefit of the project and team member relationships. Too often, beyond introducing/explaining these concepts, a discussion of teamwork instruction provides mere mention to “putting students in teams” and providing them with a project to complete. The assumption underlying this approach is that students will “learn by doing” simply because they know these concepts and/or are a part of a project team. In fact, this attitude is prevalent, even among students. This assumption has resulted in minimal discussion of teamwork pedagogy in 1 We include this literature as evidence that we are familiar with existing engineering teaming research. We point to a gap in the research, specifically, team pedagogy, rather than provide an exhaustive review of all teaming research, as this is beyond the scope of our project. P ge 15979.3 the literature, and arguably, minimal instructional time devoted to the teaching of teamwork principles. Often, the unfortunate reality of teamwork in the classroom (stemming from a lack of productive team pedagogy) is that students find themselves in patterns of unproductive team communication that can lead to conflicts. 30 Furthermore, they may be ill-equipped to manage or resolve those resulting conflicts, and thus, find themselves inadequately prepared to handle team issues in the workplace. 31-32 Lack of team communication skills can result in diminished creativity and innovation, and/or teams settling on a less than adequate design solution, because they do not know how to work well together, or in more extreme circumstances, teams dissolving altogether. Further compounding the problem of lack of specific instruction is the inherent contradiction between an engineer’s technical education and his/her professional education. In other words, teamwork necessitates an attitude of and comfort with collaboration, while most of an engineering student’s technical education prioritizes individual expertise and application of math and science. As a result, students who have historically been rewarded for individual achievement are now being asked to prioritize cooperation and collaboration. Moreover, a disconnect exists between the engineering teamwork literature and the research on teams from the communication and education disciplines. Specifically, engineering education research about teams tends to associate various antecedent variables (gender, year in school, grade point average) with expected outcomes (team satisfaction, project or course grade). 16-18 However, teamwork is a complex, communicative process that can be enhanced or hindered depending on the communication abilities of the team members. Our purpose was to enhance undergraduate engineering education through foregrounding teamwork principles and productive team communication practices in this first class in a foursemester sequence. Knowing that the previous curricular alignment was deficient in that it provided students with teamwork education in only the introductory freshman design class and senior design class, our intention was to create an educational environment with the focus on recurring training in teamwork, oral communication, and writing. The new plan sees ME 1000 as the first of four consecutive courses introducing and reinforcing these collaborative skills. This SPIRAL model has been incorporated in order to track the progression of learning objectives for each of these three competencies—teamwork, writing, and speaking. SPIRAL Model The SPIRAL curriculum is predicated on creating foundations and building blocks for learning objectives. Lesso