Be careful: The people who are most competent at something are rarely the best picks to teach that field.
Multiple reasons come to mind. One, they can’t imagine what it’s like to not know something, or to not have certain habits of mind. I don’t know what it’s like to not be able to write cogent sentences; I can see some people who plainly can’t, and I can’t emulate their minds using my own, which means I can’t see how their processes are going wrong. That makes me a fairly good writer and a truly terrible English teacher, which is one reason I’ve never been an English teacher.
That dovetails into the next reason: Teaching is a learned skill, and someone who has learned some other skills to expert level may or may not have spent time on learning how to teach. This is, apparently, completely unimportant at the university level, but at high school and below, teachers who know how to teach are valued and, if you’re trying to learn how to teach, it would be nice to learn from someone who has at least a passing knowledge of the theory of pedagogy.
Wul, durr. I’d also like to travel abroad and see how they do it in other countries, and while we’re at it, I could use letters of recommendation from the last five presidents.
Lacking that, I figured I’d just study under an awardwinning professor of education and author of several books on the subject. And I did. Bleh.
When all those awardwinning teachers gather in one place, let me know. I’d like to hear what they have to say.
I would add a detail or two: I’ve known some brilliant special ed teachers who bombed horribly when they tried to teach teachers. Had one in college, in fact. Utterly brilliant woman when dealing with autism and schizophrenia who was totally lost dealing with growed up college students with no cognitive disorders.
Still less frustrating than the prof who couldn’t be bothered.
Big teams are made up of lots of small teams. Many of which contain idiots. And despite what you have read, it is hard to fire idiots for being idiots. Don’t give them a raise, but they know they are idiots and will stay on, grateful for being employed.
And when the project gets screwed up, corporate America does fire great gobs of people. It is easier then firing people one at a time.
Anyhow my point was that learning to work in teams during school is really, really useful.
With modern flat organizations the project manager is within the team, with no real management authority but plenty of responsibility. The actual manager has 15 or 20 reports, and if he knows what is going on in the project you are lucky.
And most managers don’t want to hear about conflicts in the team. Someone not showing up is a different story. So the real world and the class world are pretty similar. In the corporate world sometimes the project manager has a good track record and is respected by the other members, which probably happens less often in a class.
This I understand. The danger in the real world is that despite the fact you can do everything twice as fast as the other people on the team, when you take on 3 times the work you start to fall behind. The number one mistake new managers make is doing not managing, since they do better than most of their team.
The class I’m thinking of was a seminar with about 25 people where we designed a computer language. It was an object oriented language when this was still new, long before C++. We broke into teams to work on different aspects of the thing. Pretty much everyone who contributed got an A, grad seminars are nice that way, but most people were pretty into the class. So, this was not sit in a room getting lectured at kind of class.
The conflicts covered were not caused by idiots, they were caused by two smart and strong willed people disagreeing, which happens all the time when you do something that has never been done before. In Silicon Valley idiots might slow things down but they don’t cause conflicts because no one listens to them.
Oh, if only it was so easy in the real world. You don’t get to give out grades except once a year, and as I said even Ds are adored by losers. Chunks of projects are often not so very neat and clean. And the boss, who is getting overworked by her boss, is not going to want to spend a lot of precious time solving playground squabbles. BTW good performers know this and don’t go asking for someone else to solve the problems.
And you also have the problem of someone not performing because they are sick, not because they are lazy.
You see, a teacher can swoop in and make it better through grading, but that doesn’t teach the team skills people need to have. I think the slacker being shamed by other team members might be better than getting a bad grade.
Guess what - most work projects wind up with the same composition of people. More or less. You assign the guy on the bottom the crap work that is necessary but which anyone can do and the guy on the top comes up with new ideas and leads. The trickiest situation is when there are two very smart people on the team who disagree. That can kill things much faster than a slacker.
I wish. Getting people to follow standards at work can be really hard. The problem is that your important standard is for them one more unnecessary time waster when five more important things are competing for their attention.
I finally gave up on getting ten people to follow my file naming convention and just wrote some code to figure out what the name should be and rename the file accordingly. And another guy closer to them spend weeks to get them to put the files in the same place every night. And none of these people are idiots, just busy and over worked.
That sounds like a project that someone should put together. But I’m talking specifically about the top performers in your general grade level or subject. Theory is great, but it lags behind the best performers, IME. They’re going to have a lot of practical advice and techniques that, although possibly needing a little prodding to get it out of them, would be worth the effort in most cases, no doubt.
And MY point is that neither the public schools nor the two universities I have attended HAVE TAUGHT A DAMN THING ABOUT WORKING IN TEAMS. Perhaps things are different where you are, but here it’s just “get in groups and make it work somehow.” THERE IS NO TEACHING PEOPLE TO WORK IN TEAMS. Perhaps they do this at Intel. I dunno. I’ve never worked there. It would be useful if the public schools did this. But they don’t. Teamwork and group work isn’t on any standardized test I’ve ever seen, and is therefore wildly undervalued. See above.
…this would seem to support my current idea that you are posting from some other planet, or perhaps a parallel dimension. Either that, or you assume that you know what you’re talking about. Neither of these are truisms. At least, not anywhere I’ve ever worked.
…which, again, seems to support my earlier point of “Hellwichu people, I’m going to do this thing, and you can all lead, follow, or get the hell out of my way.”
I loathed group projects as a faculty member but was required to include them in all of my classes. I tried all iterations: form groups myself, let students form groups, form groups at random, none worked well. Whoever came up with the group idea was an idiot. Especially for engineers who are mostly solitary by nature, it’s why we choose engineering in the first place. I eventually let students form groups of one.
Guess what. I’m a professional project manager and manage teams professionally. And, you don’t. Never have and I’ve been project managing teams for fifteen years in three different organization. The composition of teams in a workplace has different challenges, but you don’t get the total incompetence of school teams, you don’t get free riders, and anyone who doesn’t complete their tasks to the satisfaction of the team as a whole is held accountable by the team, then to their functional manager.
My experience from school also. It was more of a case study of The Lord of the Flies Approach to Group Work. If you want to teach kids how to work in teams, that’s fine, but you need to teach it. It’s a skill. They really don’t learn it by running wild like “onlies” with no “grups” around.
The worst group project experience I had was in college. I was a “mature student” (26 years old, likely 27 at this point) and one class assigned a group project. I didn’t know anybody in the class so I approached a couple of guys who looked about my age to work with them. We met a couple of times in the library to work out our basic idea and then it all fell apart. Problem was, we weren’t given in-class time to work on the project. I was working and going to school, didn’t drive and lived across town - therefore I had to adhere to the city bus schedule which meant tacking on an extra hour to going anywhere. I simply was not able to meet with these guys in person outside of class hours. I offered to do what I could without actually meeting with them, but they got frustrated with me and the one guy sent me a scathing e-mail essentially calling me a lazy slacker. I felt awful. I approached the teacher and explained my dilemna and apparently the other guys had already approached him about kicking me out of their group. I was fine with taking a zero on that assignment as long as I still passed the course. I always felt bad about letting those guys down though.
You are lucky. I’ve been managing for 30 years, and have seen a bit of this, even at top companies. Yeah, it is not as bad as a school group, true, but what you learn in school dealing with non-workers is helpful.
In a famous study Barry Boehm found a 10 X difference in programmer productivity. The person at the bottom of that comparison might be working as hard as he can, but sometimes that person not doing anything would be a plus. Like I said, getting rid of people is not so easy. I don’t know if your project manager job involves performance review, but I have and it is tough. Especially when you get a poor performer who is not blatantly violating company policy.
That’s a great point. Letting the team run wild is not teaching anything, but neither is stepping in and resolving the smallest of conflicts. Or waiting until the team is about to melt down.
How about this - require short progress reports or internal grading, confidential, every two weeks or so which reports on what each person has done and what they say the other people have done. If four people on a five person project say the first is doing nothing, then what that person is actually doing might be worth examining. There is a danger of ganging up, but unanimous bad marks would be expected for the horror stories described here.