Teaching Transversal Skills for Engineering Students

A guide for engineering instructors that offers engaging approaches to teaching transversal skills.

How can we better prepare engineering students to work together on dynamic, complex problems? Transversal skills are essential to maximizing the potential of technical expertise, particularly when working across disciplines, cultures, and contexts.

Teaching Transversal Skills for Engineering Students provides a practical approach for developing students’ transversal skills based on the 3T PLAY Trident framework and evidence-informed experiential learning approaches. Designed to enable higher education instructors to improve how transversal skills are taught, this book provides: graphical activity outlines with timing, mode, and materials; downloadable handouts and slides; a review of why transversal skills should be explicitly taught, which skills are under-addressed, and conditions that support students to develop skills; evidence-informed conceptual summaries and practice based tips; and a backward design structure to create new activities to teach transversal skills.