Introduction of team self-regulation for teamwork promotion. A case study in energy engineering topics

Abstract

The learning and development of teamwork skill is onlypossible if its achievement is a self-building process of the student. In turn,the teachers must become guides in the process of a learning which is notlimited only to the topic of their own course, but which must be imbedded witha good dose of this skill. Promotionof teamwork is not spontaneous but very often requires the use ofself-regulation within teams. The aim of the paper is to elucidateif positive or negative self-regulation of teams are useful to promoteteamwork. The paper presents some experiences onthe use of self-regulation of teams within ofactive teaching strategies that involve teamwork as a criticalskill in engineering education. The paper presents first the fundamentals ofthe learning strategy adopted, intended to develop teamwork abilities in thestudents. It then describes the context and challenges faced up in the casestudies, as well as the essentials of the learning activities proposed.Finally, the paper discusses the student’s achievement and perception. Althoughsome influence of unbalanced teams there exists, it can be stated that positiveself-regulation of teams is more easily accepted by teams than the negative ones,because of the influence on interpersonal relationships amongst students. Thetopics involved in this experience are energy related topics such as electricalinstallations, heat transfer, engineering thermodynamics or theory of circuits.