Initial Issues and Limitations

1. Length of the course. Given that students were only enrolled in the course for 12 weeks, we had to create a curriculum that helps students develop the cruical skills they need within that timeline.

2. Student abilities. We needed to make sure that the course is equitable and students of all skill levels would ultimately benefit from the course and develop the necessary leadership skills.

3. Teaching while developing. While the ultimate goal of the project was to design a course curriculum that best helps students develop leadership skills, we had an intial cohort in which we had to also impart these leadership skills onto. This meant that we have to evaluate each week whether the intial exercises we chose were beneficial to the students.

4. Best practices. Given that these students are going to be the future leaders of the workplace, we want to make sure that we ground both the intial and final course curriculum on solid emperical findings.

5. Course content. We wanted to make sure that while we were interested in developing students’ interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, students were still gaining the necessary business skills they were supposed to learn from this course.

Litearture Review

Based on the literature review that was done, it appears as though giving students role-play and problem-based learning activities would be most helpful for the students in developing the core skills they need. We decided that we will employ this type of pedagogy to start. The activities were chosen based on how relevant they were to the course material.

Objectives

1. Assessment of Baseline Skills: Determine the initial level of interpersonal and intrapersonal skills among business students enrolling in the course. This will enable tailored curriculum development to address specific gaps and strengths in their leadership skill set.

2. Uncover Motivations: Investigate the underlying motivations driving students to enhance their leadership skills. Understanding these motivations will guide the creation of engaging and relevant activities that resonate with the students’ aspirations and professional goals.

3. Discover Pain Points: Explore potential difficulties students may encounter with the proposed activities. This insight will aid in developing effective support mechanisms and adjustments to ensure a smooth learning experience — allowing us to maximize both engagement and skill acquisition for the students.

Methods

1. Surveys. We had 2 types of surveys that we had the students complete. The first survey was an assessment survey. We used this survey to understand the baseline skill level that the students were at in terms of interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills and leadership skills. We also had students complete this survey again at the end of the course in order to see if there were improvements in their interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills and leadership skills. These surveys were based on emperically proven constructs that have been tested by researchers and businesses.
   The second type of survey we had the students complete was a feedback survey. These surveys were given to students each week in order to understand their concerns and to evaluate whether the students were gaining the cruical skills they were supposed to gain from the activities. These surveys were both scaled-based and open-ended.

   • A sample scaled-based question we asked the students was: “On the following 5-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, please indicate how much you feel the role-play/problem-based activity you completed in class helped you develop your social skills.”

   • Sample open-ended questions were: “Please describe in a couple of sentences what difficulties you had for the role-play/problem-based activity you completed in class today” and “Please let us know what you liked best about the role-play/problem-based activity that you completed in class today.”

2. Contextual Inquiry: Because the activities are problem-based, we need to make sure they were simple and clear and students can glean a sufficient amount of knowledge from completing them. Contextual inquiry allows us to discover possible pain points via understanding how students are completing the excercises. This helps us discover where they are struggling and most importantly, why. This give us directions on how to modify the activities for the following week as well as the final curriculum. Furthermore, contextual inquiry helps us uncover motivations that the students have in developing their leadership skills — providing us with the knowledge on how to best modify the activities to best resonate with their goals.

Results

Our assessment survey indicated that compared to the beginning of the course, students at the end of course had significantly better intrapersonal, interpersonal and leadership skills. Therefore, it appears as though our initial course curriculum would be effective in helping students develop core leadership skills.

Based on our feedback surveys and the contextual inquiry we conducted, we found that students would be more motivated and engaged in the role-play and problem-based activities if they found them to be relevant in their daily lives. Therefore, we made sure to modify each role-play/problem-based activity according to fit with the students’ needs (e.g., including a salary negotiation role-play). We also found that it is beneficial to the students if they were provided with weekly feedback based on the activities they did. This helps motivate the students and keeps them engaged in the course material — allowing them to gain the necessary skills we want them to gain from the course.

The contextual inquiry we conducted also indicated that it is beneficial to first develop intrapersonal skills for students since it helps them more easily develop their interpersonal skills.

Finally, we found students also felt that a group project was something they believed was necessary in order to help them further develop interpersonal, intrapersonal and leadership skills since they would be working in teams. We decided that for the final curriculum, we would include a relevant course project for them (e.g., helping an external organization develop a training program for conflict resolution).

As such, we decided that the following structure is best for the course curriculum we set out to design:

1. First, 4 weeks of role-plays/problem-based activities to help students develop intrapersonal skills. This would be followed by 4 weeks that are focused on helping students develop interpersonal skills and finally students would work on a relevant group-project for the final 4 weeks to help them develop their leadership skills.

2. The weekly role-play and problem-based activities would be relevant to students (e.g., job salary negotiation).

3. Have after-class journals where students can write down what they have learnt and for us to provide them with weekly feedback.

4. Have assessment surveys at the beginning and end of the course to evaluate whether there are improvements to their intrapersonal, interpersonal and leadership skills.

Previous course outline/structure which focused on developing business acumen in students. This course outline ignored the importance of helping students develop leadership skills.

Research Impact

1. The course curriculum that we developed is still being used today to help students develop necessary leadership skills.

2. Found that the curriculum that we designed consistently improve students’ interpersonal, intrapersonal and leadership skills.

3. Presented this pedgaogy approach in multiple conferences in order to help educators and researchers understand the benefits and how it can be used and applied to their own courses.