2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Psychological safety is a critical component of effective teaming. In engineering education, programs rarely teach effective teaming skills and even fewer teach skills for fostering psychological safety. To address this gap, we developed modules to teach engineering students a framework that promotes psychological safety. We implemented these modules at the beginning of the civil engineering sections of an Introduction to Design course. These modules enabled students to experience and practice effective teaming skills through role-playing. The modules focused on how to act and how to respond to promote psychological safety on design projects. Each module was tailored to a different phase of the design process. The themes of the three modules are (1) treating every idea as having potential to contribute to a positive outcome, (2) questioning an idea to obtain valuable insight, and (3) applying the brake to improve a decision. To explore the impact of the modules, we deployed a post-course survey to measure students’ perceptions of psychological safety on their project teams. Compared to control sections of freshman design in other majors, the civil engineering students reported increased psychological safety. Generally, the civil engineering students felt more comfortable in bringing up problems and tough issues, and felt more safe taking risks. These modules are general enough to be applicable to any engineering field, and they are flexible enough to be included in curricula in a variety of ways.