Illuminating Staff Collaborations in Student Professional Development

This article represents a Full Paper. Students are often the beneficiaries of staff-led and managed programs where they acquire and hone professional development skills outside the classroom. Given the ongoing transformation toward a "whole new engineer" [1], we decided to focus on university staff and their involvement in improving student outcomes. The three teams profiled in this article were part of a larger set of 12 grassroots teams at a large, public U.S. university. We examine these three successful teams, all staff-led, two with six members and one with eight members. We were interested in how team members conceptualized their individual roles and their professional networks in helping their teams accomplish their goals. The data, illustrated through their statements and drawings, enable us to capture and explain their insider perspectives on these collaborations, the strategies they employed to overcome issues, the value they placed on divergent team-member views, and the factors they believed to be essential for success.