2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper represents a second work-in-progress update on a collaborative activity we call teaming. “Teaming” refers to a structured form of dialogue that can play an important role in engineering education change efforts. The previous ASEE publication outlined the basic principles of a teaming session and explained theoretical reasons for the connection between this form of dialogue and culture change. It also offered a window into the kinds of outcomes (e.g., shared responsibility, inspiration, trust) associated with teaming as well as the mechanisms that connect the teaming principles to the outcomes. It would be great to have a larger body of research around teaming and its impact, but getting to such a larger body of research involves dissemination and uptake of this practice. Toward that goal, this paper will address a practical problem – the creation of teaming prompts. While teaming is relatively simple, analysis of our ongoing work has identified the construction of prompts as a pivotal part of teaming and a part that must be continually done. This paper asks: What is involved in creating an effective prompt for a teaming experience?

In particular, this paper will investigate the broad work of finding inspiration for prompts and the detailed work of refining a prompt. As data, we will consider a set of nine prompts that span two academic years and a departmental leadership change. Examples prompts include, “What experiences/thoughts have you had about grading recently,” and “Picture one or more students that have inspired you. Share what you are thinking about how/why they inspire you.” In addition, we will be working with traces that capture the thinking that went into the creation of these prompts, various perspectives on the effectiveness of the prompts, and traces about what happened when the prompts were deployed. We will rely primarily on a constant-comparison logic to identify findings. The trustworthiness of our research is strengthened by the interdisciplinary nature of our research team and the data collection that captured our thinking during the process of using the nine prompts.

To address the question of prompt inspiration, we will analyze our data to recover the stories behind each of the prompts (e.g., why did we ask about grading) and aim to articulate a set of suggestions stemming from our experiences. To address the question of prompt refinement, we will report on dimensions of variation identifiable in the prompts. We will pay particular attention to features of prompts that seem to connect to the outcomes of a teaming session such as shared ownership, inspiration, trust. Our goal is a set of features that can function as a guide for others when making their own prompts.

By sharing the collection of prompts and the evidence-based insights related to creating them, we aim to make teaming easier to adopt. We hope that this catalyzes the use of teaming so that others may benefit and a larger body of scholarship may develop.