Developing an AE Tutoring Engaging Advising & Mentoring (TEAM) Program: a Peer Cohort Environment

To promote maturity towards learning, student connections with others is vital. Academic growth requires supportive conditions to flourish, specifically autonomy. By creating a knowledge-intense social system of student interaction with interdependent agents (students, faculty, and staff) is common in college setting. However and more often, these learning interactions are focused on small subsets of students' interactions or faculty to student connections. A known strength of these social systems is their ability to enable creativity and adaptability skills by assembling combinations of existing practices towards the development of students. Knowing this, the Architectural Engineering (AE) Program at Penn State aimed to create an environment that championed a closed-knit peer-to-peer learning community. AE TEAM (an acronym standing for Architectural Engineering Tutoring, Engaging, Advising, and Mentoring) was created to promote engaged learning support and student self-efficacy development through a low-stress extracurricular environment. AE TEAM is student run and managed by a group of upper level undergraduate AE students who are recruited from across the four AE sub-disciplines. AE TEAM is currently held during weeknights where students in need can consult with student tutors on a drop-in basis for both AE and pre-major courses. This paper shares the formulation, management, and general trends of this unique program as an exchange of ideas towards development of more engaged, motivated, and successful future engineers.