Skip to main content

Developing Interdisciplinary Team Working Competencies

Category
Design for Delivery
TIPS Blog
Date
Tags

This post provides evidence-based practical tips for academics to use when creating or improving interdisciplinary team learning experiences for students. 

Importance of Interdisciplinary Team Working 

Globalisation and other factors have led to graduates increasingly being required to work in interdisciplinary teams.  In terms of the labour market and interdisciplinary employability skills, there is a growing demand for boundary crossing competences that help to meet the global challenges and the needs of society (Darylmple, Macrae, Pal & Shipman, 2021).   

Moreover, there are an increasing number of roles in interconnected spaces such as policy, science, health care, government and business.  Interdisciplinary teamworking enables students to develop professional literacies, including complex problem-solving, ability to see different perspectives and transferable skills (Hart, 2019). The importance of the above has been recognised in Curriculum Redefined and the Surfacing Skills initiative. 

Case Study – Innovation Thinking and Practice Module 

This module has been designed to enable students to develop and surface skills such as team-working, collaboration and communication skills, commercial awareness and resilience by working in diverse interdisciplinary teams. Each team works together on a project to address a real-world innovation challenge developed in collaboration with an external organisation.  

To ensure diversity, the student cohort includes final year undergraduate students from Business and Computing Schools, and additional students from right across the University who can take the module as a Discovery option. The current cohort size is 140 students. Plans are in place to significantly increase student numbers as part of Curriculum Redefined. 

During the module, students undertake research on the challenge and key stakeholders, develop ideas, prototypes and commercial value and communicate their innovation. To deepen and surface their learning, students write weekly reflective journals and a final reflective essay, which is used for summative assessment. 

Evidence Based Findings 

The practical tips for academics below draw upon research undertaken by the post’s authors and colleagues in the Interdisciplinary and Digitally Enhanced learning and enhancing Employability Skills (I-DE-ES) LITE Fellowship project. The project has developed evidence taking input from the Innovation and Thinking Practice module, including detailed analysis of student reports, journals and interviews. 

Practical Tips 

To equip students with interdisciplinary team working skills, a range of teaching and learning activities can be utilised. These include: 

  • Careful allocation of team members across all teams to maximise diversity, taking into account discipline and other student characteristics. 
  • The use of icebreaker activities in the initial team forming stage. For example, these can be used to promote team building, introduce students to collaboration or other tools used on the module, and/or enable the teaching team to understand student aspirations and concerns regarding the module through use of a ‘Hopes and Fears’ exercise. 
  • Use of learning activities that create opportunities for students to diverge to generate diverse individual inputs, then converge to review and make decisions about these as a team. This fosters inclusivity and enable students to explore and appreciate different learning styles and ways of working. 
  • The introduction of a ‘curveball’ learning activity to force students to change direction during a module. This enables students to understand the implications of enforced change, develop resilience and additional problem-solving skills. 
  • Utilisation of multiple team tasks with specific goals. This helps students understand how to prioritise tasks and better understand how problems can be turned into opportunities.   
  • Use of practical exercises that engage interdisciplinary team members in understanding the importance of active listening and providing constructive feedback, for example when presenting ideas, in an appropriate manner, and/or interviewing external industry experts as part of their research. 

Impacts 

The use of the approaches described above is highly valued by students.  

For example, in 2022/2023 the module achieved 100% student evaluation rating for providing opportunities to interact with others and share knowledge, ideas and perspectives.   

Module evaluation feedback reflects the benefits students perceived from working in diverse interdisciplinary teams: 

  • “I loved the mixed degrees in this module, it's the first time I have been able to work with people from so many different disciplines around Leeds, it's been so interesting to get a new perspective into how others work and what makes a group mix well.” 
  • “Offered a great experience since it allowed students from different areas to collaborate with each other to offer solutions to real life problems.” 
  • “I learned so much and worked with people from such diverse academic backgrounds for the first time.” 
  • “It is refreshing to collaborate with people that have different backgrounds and competencies, as it simulates the business environment.” 
  • “The main thing I liked about this module was the fact that everyone got the chance to improve their teamwork skills. It helps shy people get out of their comfort zone and start talking more freely.” 

The Innovation Thinking and Practice module was shortlisted for best Business School of the Year at the Times Higher Education Awards in 2021. 

Takeaways 

There are benefits of taking time to carefully design student teams. We can purposefully assign students to each team from diverse backgrounds by discipline and specialism, and by other factors such as gender, nationality and/or experience.  

This blog provides participants with additional evidence-based tips for facilitating enhanced interdisciplinary student projects, whether working on a module, programme or via a co-curricular activity.  

Academics can use these tips to enhance their own design and development of interdisciplinary student learning by embedding all or some or all of these tips into their own practice. 

To find out more contact the I-DE-ES LITE Project team 

  • Louisa Hill – L.Hill@leeds.ac.uk 
  • Tony Morgan – T.Morgan@leeds.ac.uk 

Additional Reading

  • Dalrymple, R., Macrae, A., Pal, M. & Shipman, S. (2021). Employability: A Review of the Literature 2016-2021. York, UK: Advance HE.  
  • Hart, J. (2019). Interdisciplinary project-based learning as a means of developing employability skills in undergraduate science degree programs. Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability, 10(2). DOI: 10.21153/jtlge2019vol10no2art827.  

Do you have an example of your practice to share?

If you are interested in submitting an article to the TIPS Blog find out how to submit here, or contact the TIPS Editors at academicdev@leeds.ac.uk