The Challenge, Thrill, and Satisfaction of "Getting on the Same Page": A Classroom Exercise for Experiencing Intense Team Communication and Shared Mental Model Creation

Team communication and shared mental models are topics which suffer from a truism effect; that team members must be “on the same page” to accomplish their work is a truism that can stifle student interest in richer insights. The exercise described in this paper is a building-block team experience whereby students explore the challenge, thrill, and satisfaction of generating shared mental models in a multidisciplinary team. Insights are strengthened by pairing the exercise with a pertinent research paper (Uitdewilligen and Waller, 2018) about crisis teams. Students learn team communication strategies including structuring, information sharing, and interpretation exchanging.