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Name: Kathryn Narciso
Date: Tuesday, August 15, 2017
Time: 4:00pm
Location: JS Coon 217
Committee Chair:
Professor Paul Verhaeghen, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Thesis Committee Members:
Professor Leslie DeChurch, Ph.D. (Northwestern University)
Professor Mary Lynn Realff, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Professor Ruth Kanfer, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Professor Bruce Walker, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Title: Training Transportable Teamwork Competencies for Higher Education
Abstract
The increased use of teams in organizations has led higher education to re-evaluate professional development opportunities for students to ensure exposure to teamwork. Exposure alone will not teach students essential teamwork skills, yet universities lack an organized effort to ensure students are equipped with the teamwork skills they claim to develop in the classroom. Efforts by instructors often lead to disparate methods not always informed by research. There is a great deal that team training scholarship can tell us about what and how to teach students about teamwork skills. This dissertation aims to create a teamwork training program for students, one focused on an individual’s collaboration readiness rather than the team. The focus on the individual is more appropriate for the classroom and allows students to internalize the curriculum and apply it to future team experiences. Training assignments will require individual and team work, as the best way to learn material is through practice.
The training program developed in this dissertation will be tested with four different methods of instruction. First, the level of self-awareness will be manipulated within the training. The goal is to see if additional self-reflection will increase collaboration readiness. Second, the mode of instruction will either be facilitation or self-directed. Different modes of instruction may be relevant for different courses, so it’s necessary to look at these two methods of instruction. This dissertation local and global impact: students directly benefit from team training, which in turn benefits their future class team projects and eventually their place of employment. By providing evidence-based training that could eventually be scaled to university-wide implementation, students can graduate gaining skills necessary to be a successful teammate.
