Developing Transversal Competences in Higher Education: Class Experiences about Team-Working and Leadership

Abstract

Grades and Master programs that have been recently designed in the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV) do include a series of transversal and specific competences that, according to recent international accreditation processes such as the ABET -Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology-, fully accomplish the requirements that have been settled internationally. Nevertheless, there are still some aspects to be improved related to transversal competences and they are mostly related to the lack of experience in designing, evaluating and collecting evidences of the improvement experienced by the student in these fields. Up to date, most lecturers assumed that students would learn to effectively communicate by practicing, there was no need to explicitly teach how to communicate and the same applied for team working or leadership. In fact, how can a lecturer teach how to lead when they do not how to do it or worst, they are no leaders at all? The gauntlet has been thrown down. A team of lecturers from different Degrees have been introducing the work and evaluation of "teamwork and leadership" in their course during the past course, 2014/15. This paper gathers their experience through activity report with full details about the experiences (resources, timing.). The implementation of these competences requires an extra time of preparation and also implies a time consumption of class hours, which is often a critical issue. However the experience has been satisfactory in all the cases: students have positively valued this innovation and lecturers are aware that the current education trends lead us on this direction, so better to join as soon as possible.