2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This GIFT details an activity aimed at engaging students in discussions and rehearsals of teamwork practices in an introductory engineering course. The teamwork learning activity is a series of structured reflections that are inspired by the teamwork challenges that happened in previous years of teaching the course.
One objective of the two-semester introductory engineering course sequence at a large public Mid-Atlantic research-focused university is that students learn to effectively collaborate with teammates. While many teams demonstrate effective teamwork, several struggle to successfully collaborate every year. We were thus motivated to enhance the learning of teamwork skills. Students were given opportunities to practice teamwork skills throughout the year by working in different teams, but instructors may not have prepared students for dealing with teamwork challenges.
Further, the same types of challenges reappeared each year. That consistency motivated our research team to typify the teamwork challenges that were appearing in our classrooms, described in a separate paper. We then developed narrative cases inspired by the typical teamwork conflicts that appeared in our classroom to build a teamwork learning activity.
The objectives of our teamwork learning activity are that students rehearse reactions to team conflict, build empathy, and strengthen camaraderie. Primarily, we want students to think through various types of team conflict, consider how they would react and what resources are available to them. The teamwork learning activity is an opportunity for students to rehearse team conflict so that if they experience a similar conflict in real-life, they feel equipped to meet the challenge because they have previously thought it through. Additionally, we want students to begin to build empathy for teammates whose actions might initially make them feel angry or frustrated through exploring teamwork conflict from the perspective of multiple people on a team. Finally, we want to strengthen the camaraderie amongst members of the design teams in our classes through asking students to share their personal prior experiences of teamwork and rehearse team conflict within their engineering design teams.
We designed narrative cases based on teamwork challenges that were prevalent in our courses. Each case of teamwork conflict is described from the perspective of multiple team members on a team. We drew inspiration from student reflections on teamwork whenever possible, de-identifying the scenario entirely while trying to remain authentic to the students’ self-reported thoughts and feelings. Next, we developed a set of reflection questions to accompany the scenarios. Instructors implemented the activity for the first fifteen minutes of class time every other week in the 2025-2026 school year.
In the classroom, we first introduce the perspective of one student who is, generally, a frustrated individual who feels like one of their other teammates is holding the team back from success. Students then discuss a series of reflective questions in their engineering design teams before sharing some of their responses in whole-class discussion. We then present the same scenario from the perspective of another student. This is generally the perspective of the student(s) who were perceived to be problematic in the first perspective. This second perspective contradicts or complicates students’ understanding of the first perspective. We again have them discuss reflective questions in their teams and share out in whole class discussion. Finally, we end the activity by asking the students to connect the case study to their own past experiences with teams and reflect with their group.
We did not require students to complete any assignments during the activity because we wanted them to be focused on engaging in conversation with their teammates. Instead, there are three separate ways that we assess teamwork broadly that demonstrated students’ understanding of and engagement in the teamwork learning activity.
First, each team created a “Culture Contract” which documented their team goals and behavioral expectations. The culture contracts gave insight into the ways that students were considering the sources of conflict that were addressed in the case studies and were preparing their team to minimize those conflicts and to know how to behave if those conflicts arose.
Second, after each design project (and at mid-points for longer projects) we gave students a written reflection assignment that had a question specifically about teamwork. Finally, we had students evaluate their own teamwork and the teamwork of each member of the team using the CATME peer evaluation tool. Answers to the written reflection questions and the CATME survey provided insights into what was happening in the team, challenges that arose, and the conflict resolution behaviors that were being used.