Time spent in collaborative activities has increased by more than 50% over the last 20 years in response to difficult real-world problems. To better prepare senior students for working together and integrating disciplinary knowledge we created authentic educational experiences within a supportive environment for students to work together in small teams to solve a complex problem based on real data. Third year nutrition students worked directly with third year statistics students in small teams to integrate and share their knowledge to define their own research question (based on data from the Australian Health Survey, 2011-12). 

We  deliberately formed teams to maximise diversity relating to gender, ethnicity, academic strength, academic discipline, and culture. We further cultivated expression of cognitive diversity through the development of an online application (https://kimbelland.shinyapps.io/thinkapp) to identify student’s thinking preferences. By increasing student’s awareness of self and others, we enabled teams to leverage strengths of individual members and to set clear team roles and responsibilities. 

To promote inclusion, the teaching team guided students to foster psychological safety and encourage productive conflict (how to disagree well) to generate better ideas and outcomes. We aimed to embed a positive team culture to build student’s confidence by teaching students practical ways for ensuring all voices are heard by providing a safe environment for interpersonal risk taking.