Treffer: A Tale of Two Courses: Exploring Teaching Teamwork through Experiential Team Projects

According to employers, college graduates should possess interpersonal skills including the ability to work in and lead teams. Many instructors incorporate group projects in their courses to encourage student development of teamwork and leadership skills through experience. Research suggests, however, these skills must be taught explicitly. To test this, we explored overt and covert approaches to teaching teamwork in classes implementing experiential learning through team projects. We assessed individual and team-level outcomes at the beginning and end of a 16-week semester across both courses. Students receiving overt instruction reported significant increases across all five measured domains of individual teamwork skills. Students receiving covert instruction reported significant increases in only one domain, project planning. For team level outcomes, only students receiving covert instruction showed a significant increase in psychological safety over the course of the semester. The major implication of this research is if individual teamwork skill development is a course learning objective, instructors should consider explicitly teaching teamwork. Further research is needed to investigate the limited change in student team-level outcomes between overt and covert teamwork teaching approaches.

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