Yes, it can be hard to teach this, but it helps people go much further in life.
I’ve been doing some larger work on my own lately. It’s been two steps forward, and one step back most of the time. It would be nice to collaborate on this, but that’s not an option at the moment. A partner, or team would make it easier to remove the brick walls that appear occasionally along the way. Talking to the rubber duck is useful too, but never as fun as talking to a person.
Teaching students how to collaborate is an important part of software development. They prefer individual work as each person graduates on their own. They have more control when working on their own. However, they need to learn to work collaboratively for their future careers.
Think of what you can gain from each collaboration
While students collaborate in courses, because they have to, you can help them improve the situation by framing it as an opportunity. When you realise what you might gain from an experience, then you can make it more interesting.
For larger team projects, this exploration of opportunities helps motivate each person. They should be able to see what’s in it for them. This could be their chance to dig deeper into a language, framework, or similar. Alternatively, it could be their chance to learn to work more easily with other people. If they look at this as a chance to fill in gaps in their cv, then this should also open up options too. Asking them to pause and consider this is useful.
You can also tie this in with team charter exercises too. In any case, when each person knows what they can gain from the collaboration, then they are more oriented in what they need, or can do to get the most out of the experience.
Create opportunities for your students at all levels of study
You can probably provide something for all levels of students. In early years, there can be practical sessions where people do an exercise with another person. This also lets students get to know each other. This can also be done throughout the degree on a regular basis.
Shorter pair, or trio exercises, or assignments also provide chances for students to apply collaborative skills to their work too. On these it is useful to have some part of the work that is done individually. If there is no obvious part, then a reflective essay discussing how they found the experience is a good option. You can always ask them ‘what surprised them’, or ‘what was your best/worst experience’, and ‘how might we improve this assignment’.
All of these offer them opportunities to work in pairs outwith the larger team projects, so they have experiences to draw on, when working in a larger team. They should have something to start with when working in a longer team project.
Where will you start asking your students about why they should always work collaboratively?
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration.