Never Take Teamwork for Granted! A Tutorship Experience on Soft-Skills

Abstract

Collaborative design-based learning is widely employed within academic design education, being recognised as a valuable pedagogical approach historically rooted and yet well-established within the design studio pedagogy. However, this great learning potential may not consolidate if it is not well integrated into the didactics. From this initial observation in the context of the MSc Design & Engineering course at Politecnico di Milano the researchers developed a tutorship path implemented for a group of students along their entire master's programme, both in presence and remotely. The paper presents this action research which was conducted through the intervention and support of students in different key moments of their training. The tutorship on teamwork has been focused on providing activities to effectively perform initial team agreement, mid-term, and final evaluations (i.e., self, peer, and team assessments), along with constant support and coaching on team management. All these activities have been designed and provided in parallel to the design studios of the master's, meaning that each of them was related to real situations occurring during students' collaborative work. Qualitative data has been collected through a focus group organised with a group of 6 students at the end of the programme to evaluate the proposed path on teamwork. Four relevant themes emerged from data interpretation, which could inform teachers in the design of formalised paths on teamwork and soft skills. Additionally, the research contributes to wider discussion on soft skills development, with particular regards to teamwork.

Peers as Experts to Cooperate With: A Case Study of Teaching Activities to Switch From Inter-Group Competition to Collaboration in a Design Studio

“…Still, they struggled to recognise the classroom group as safe to enact these processes. In the last years, several actions have been undertaken and integrated into the course to foster teambuilding and organisation at an intra-team level [10][11] [12] especially considering the cultural plurality of teams. However, the inter-team issues have been poorly studied so far.…”