Teaching Group Dynamics to Engineering Faculty

The introduction of CDIO design–build–test activities into the curriculum leads to an increased need of handling different types and also different sizes of groups of students, i.e. students have less or non experience of working in workspaces, skills of handling tools and machines differs and also sizes of groups it self could be a difficulty. Faculty members involved as supervisors for students conducting design–build–test courses often have difficulties to give proper advice and basic counselling of group dynamics issues for students. When the group doesn’t work as a group, solving problems and tasks will be delayed or sometimes not solved at all and grades will be affected for the members of student group.

In order to help faculty members in their professions as supervisors, two engineering programmes from Chalmers University of Technology and Royal Institute of Technology have developed a model to bring faculty members from different universities and programmes together, solving and preparing supervising group dynamics difficulties aroused from students in their work in groups.

The basic idea and reason to have faculty members from different universities, was to focus on the common problem, but not only, the reason was also to build alliances and tear down barriers for talking and discussing supervising problems among faculty members. The model uses two course days of teaching and workshops. It has been used for two years and has been a success for those who have followed it.

This report will present the model and a more thorough evaluation of the outcome. If and how, the impact have been to faculty members, but also how the knowledge, gained during the course, have been used both in teaching and supervising students. The evaluation also aims to find out why some faculty members have not used this opportunity to increase their supervising skills and handling students working in groups. The survey was conducted during the spring of 2006.

2nd International CDIO Conference, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden, June 13-14, 2006