2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A Team Charter to Support Student Engagement in Engineering Design Project-Teams

Low engagement from one or more team members in undergraduate engineering project-teams is a common and persistent issue. To assist students in managing their teams, many instructors have implemented the use of team charters or contracts to help students explicitly state the expectations of team members. While current team charters are effective for managing some common teamwork issues (e.g. absenteeism, completing work by an internal deadline), none are specifically designed to facilitate the engagement of team members.

This study aims to understand the team norms that affect engagement of team members within first-year engineering design teams. The research question investigated in this work is as follows: What categories of team norms influence student engagement? Semi-structured interviews with ten students from a large first-year engineering design course at [University] were conducted to answer this question. A hybrid thematic coding approach was used to analyse these interviews.

Six key categories of team norms were identified as having influence on team member engagement, as follows:
Amount of Collaboration: how closely the team works together on their tasks.
Prioritization of Personal Relationships: how much the team makes time and space for personal relationships to develop.
Expectations for Reliability: how the team expects members to fulfill their commitments.
Flexibility in Roles and Responsibilities: how rigidly the team structures themselves in their roles and responsibilities.
Expectations for Fairness: how the team views fairness, particularly in regard to workload.
Amount of Value: how much the team values the project-team and design course experience broadly.

Importantly, it is not the specific norms of the team that influence engagement, but the alignment of team member expectations around these norms. Based on these results, a team charter that is specifically designed to support the engagement of all team members through the negotiation of these categories of team norms is presented.

Authors

Dr. Victoria Kerr University of Toronto [biography]

Victoria recently completed her doctoral work in Engineering Education at the University of Toronto within the Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice. She obtained her MASc at the University of Waterloo and BESc at Western University, both in Mechanical Engineering. Victoria’s research focuses on understanding and supporting holistic engagement of first-year engineering students within their design project-teams.
Ms. Patricia Kristine Sheridan University of Toronto [biography]

Professor Sheridan is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead) and the Institute for Transdisciplinary Studies in Engineering Education and Practice (ISTEP) at the University of Toronto. Prof. Sheridan teaches teamwork and leadership in the first-year cornerstone design courses and oversees the integration of teamwork and leadership learning into the upper-year courses. She previously designed an online team-based self- and peer-assessment system that was used in multiple Canadian universities. She has also taught leadership and teamwork courses at Northwestern University, where she is a Leadership Fellow.

Prof. Sheridan holds a BASc and MASc in Mechanical Engineering, and a PhD in Engineering Leadership Education. She has previously worked on large plant-design teams in industry, and on algorithms to develop co-operative multi-agent systems in robotics.
Dr. Emily Moore P.Eng. University of Toronto [biography]

Professor Emily Moore is the Director of Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead) at the University of Toronto. She leads research and teaches on topics such as how engineers lead and learn to lead both as students and in practice. She has published on engineering leadership, equity in engineering, and incorporating systems thinking into complex decision making.

Emily was appointed as Director of ILead in October, 2018 after more than twenty years in industry. Emily started her career at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada scaling up new materials and processes from the lab to manufacturing. In her 11 years at Xerox, Emily learned a great deal about leading teams and developing new products, becoming a manager and Principal Engineer. Emily then spent 10 years at Hatch, a global engineering firm serving the mining, energy and infrastructure sectors. Emily led international teams to develop new product and service offerings and to deliver major projects, first as the Director of Technology Development and then as Managing Director, Water. Emily was also the inaugural chair of Hatch’s Global Diversity and Inclusion efforts. Emily holds a Bachelor Degree in Engineering Chemistry from Queen’s University and completed a Doctorate in Physical Chemistry from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. In 2016 Emily was recognized as one of 100 Global Inspirational Women in Mining and received the SCI Canada Kalev Pugi Award.

Emily continues her involvement with industry by serving on boards, including Metrolinx (2019-2024), Chemtrade Logistics, International Petroleum, and the Canadian Mining Innovation Council.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026