A pressure cooker - Coaching framework for teaching soft skills in an engineering master's programme

Abstract

Civil engineering projects increasingly involve a wide range of stakeholders with diverse interests and multidisciplinary teams. Engineers need soft skills to deal with these teams and stakeholders. “How to educate these soft skills to engineering students?” is the central question for technical universities. The course Collaborative Design and Engineering in the Dutch master's programme Construction Management and Engineering is an answer to that question. Feedback, however, indicated that the course did not meet expectations. The course needed a radical redesign. This paper describes the redesign and resulting framework of the course. The principles of the redesign are constructive alignment, activated learning and not to lecture the skills as `dry stuff'. The resulting course is based on a `pressure cooker - coaching' framework. The pressure cooker part creates a situation in which the students will experience stress. The students work in large groups on a complex assignment under time pressure. A mix of group and individual assignments creates tension between students. The coaching part provides structure and guidance. Theory on the necessary soft skills is introduced early in the course in workshops. Consultation meetings help to keep the students on track. The course has now evolved over three years. Theoretical evaluation shows that the `pressure cooker - coaching' framework fulfills the requirements of constructive alignment. Practical evaluation, using feedback, shows a consistent high score. We consider the `pressure cooker - coaching' framework broadly applicable and is successful enough to continue in our CDE course. Elements of the course can be improved. We consider introducing more theoretical depth and psychology without violating our idea of `no dry stuff' and `action learning'.