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Teamwork
and Active Learning |
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Too
often, engineers get labeled as antisocial. Nothing could
be further from the truth. In fact, engineering relies
on social involvement, cooperation and collaboration to
get the work done as much as-or more than-most other professional
disciplines.
The vast majority of engineering projects draw on the
talents of a group of engineers. The group may involve
only a handful of engineers or up to thousands of them.
The idea of an independent, isolated engineer innovating
products from his basement workbench is, to sum it up
in a word, passé.
The engineer's use of collaboration and teamwork does
not suddenly begin when she starts her first position
in industry. Most engineers began their first collaborative
work in secondary school, perhaps working on a science
project or studying with friends for a math test. This
use of teamwork and collaboration to attain personal and
group goals is further reinforced and actually required
in a college engineering curriculum. This is done through
laboratory classes (with group lab reports), engineering
design teams, group presentations, and study groups.
What we are talking about here is a combination of active
learning and cooperative learning. Active learning occurs
when students work together as a group to learn during
class (as opposed to being lectured to by an instructor,
a mere "talking head"). Cooperative learning also occurs
outside of class; students work in teams on projects or
problems where they are each personally accountable for
some aspect of the work to be done, yet must rely on the
other team members to succeed. As you embark on your engineering
education, it is safe to expect you will become well acquainted
with both modes of collaborative learning.
Even when a class is not structured to encourage or mandate
active or cooperative learning, you will find that it
is to your advantage to work cooperatively with other
students whenever possible, within the guidelines set
by your instructor. When the rules of the school and the
class are respected, it's called cooperative learning.
When the rules are bent or broken, it's called cheating.
Don't be afraid to ask for help from your peers and to
work together in groups, as permitted by the rules set
for each assignment, class, and the campus standards of
conduct. When in doubt about whether a certain collaborative
activity would qualify as cheating, ask your instructor.
But for most classes, the instructor will usually tolerate
students using cooperative learning to reinforce the methods
and concepts being taught in class, as long as the students
aren't helping each other work specific problems related
to the assignments.
Students sometimes shun cooperative learning because the
class is graded on a curve (meaning that only a certain
percentage of the students will get A's, a certain percentage
will get B's, etc.) or because they think that they have
a better grasp of the material than most of the other
students. Don't fool yourself. In a cooperative learning
situation, everyone wins.
In our experience, if a certain group of students does
particularly well, the instructor-being a mostly warm-blooded
human being-will toss out the curve and give each student
the grade that has been earned. And in the situation where
you are doing cooperative learning with students who are
less well-informed on the class material than you are,
the process of helping to bring the other students up
to speed helps reinforce your own understanding of the
material. |
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