Listening by Design: Teaching Students to be More Collaborative

Engineers work collaboratively most, if not all, of the time. Yet even the most successful among them can be hindered by suboptimal teamwork. Successful collaboration is often seen as a matter of luck or innate talent. This paper describes a project that attempts to teach its essential components, in an academic setting, in a meaningful way that translates to a lasting increase in effectiveness. MIT undergraduates in team-based engineering and science courses were given a combination of lecture, workshop, introspection, and game activities woven into their collaborative technical work. Survey data indicate that more than 70% of the respondents reported useful learning about such essential collaborative behaviors as speaking up effectively in a group, learning about others’ points of view, and functioning well together under pressure. In a reflective writing exercise, students expanded upon these findings, describing concrete improvements in their teamwork. The strength of these results suggests that students not only learned information about collaboration, but more importantly that they began to put that information into practice in circumstances that directly affected the success of their engineering work. Further work will include developing more robust outcome data and longitudinal followup.

Proceedings of the 9th International CDIO Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 9 – 13, 2013.