This is the final post of a series looking at the Agile Faculty Manifesto. Read the Manifesto in this series preview post or in Chapter 1 of the book. This post explore what it means to value collaboration.
Collaboration with students, colleagues, and communities over isolated productivity.
Collaboration is one of my favorite things to talk about, probably because I resisted it for so long. as that typical Type-A student in high school and college, it was difficult for me to trust others to contribute the standard of work I expected, so I frequently did it all myself or rewrote a project the night before it was due. I remember one particular instance when, as a senior, I was assigned a partner for an assignment in my marketing class. We were to create a new product idea and develop the marketing plan for it.
Honestly, I was angry that I had been an assigned a football player as a partner. Because I stereotyped him, I just brought the entire “finished” project to him during one of our meetings to avoid having to work with him intellectually. I often think back to that experience because my partner really was perfectly capable of contributing good work had I let him. But even more I remember how hurt he looked that I clearly didn’t trust him with my grade.
So what’s that got to do with collaboration in the Agile Faculty Manifesto? Many faculty members, in my experience, were just like me in college or graduate work. We’re trained in K-12 and college that the best work is individual and anything else is cheating unless assigned to be a group project. It’s hard to snap out of that training and let others in. Rather than grades, maybe we fear what will happen to our reputations, or if being a second author on a paper is damaging to your tenure or promotion case (this claim is, of course, context- and discipline-dependent).
We may know how to cooperate with others well, but collaboration is different – whereas, cooperative efforts result in the sum of its parts, effective collaboration results in something bigger than the sum of its parts, something that could not have been created individually. That isn’t to same cooperation isn’t perfectly effective in many situations, but it’s not collaboration.
We have opportunities to collaborate everywhere in higher education – committee and task for work, department efforts, undergraduate and graduate research with our students, team teaching with colleagues across the disciplines, and certainly research. My experience collaborating with two peers on the Design Thinking Studio was truly transformative and changed the way I approach working with peers.
I’m curious under what conditions you like to collaborate with others. What makes collaboration successful or unsuccessful. If you resist collaborations, why? And if you thrive on collaboration, how might you explain that to peers who resist?
Tina Seelig’s 2015 book inGenuis: A Crash Course on Creativity is just that. A Stanford professor who has been teaching creativity and innovation for over a decade, Seelig persuasively argues that we can find opportunities for innovation everywhere when we are open and curious about the world and people around us. Like other researchers and psychologies, she notes that as we lose our sense of play as adults, we miss out on powerful opportunities to be creative, often because we fear failure – but according to Seelig, the only real failure is inaction.
Seelig condenses her wealth of knowledge into a model she calls the Innovation Engine. The engine consists of three internal elements – one’s knowledge, imagination, and attitude – as well as three external elements – resources, habitats, and culture. Then she walks the reader through her crash courses, offering advice on drawing on a wide variety of experiences and materials for new insights; strategies for better ideation, brainstorming, and observation; the role of spaces in creativity; and collaboration and small perspectives shifts as drivers of innovation.
In the introduction, Seelig shares an assignment she uses on the first day of her creativity and innovation course at the d.school: she asks students to consider the humble name tag and design a better one using the stages of design thinking, especially prototyping. I have used this activity in settings with students and with faculty with really fun results. It teaches the group quickly to question the usefulness of the unquestioned and to allow imagination to drive product rather than being “right” or “good.”
This is a fun, short volume with lots of examples and strategies to up your creativity quotient.
How do you decide what you can and can’t accomplish during a summer? We often have big ideas but put too much pressure on ourselves to do an unreasonable amounts of work, which can lead us feeling disappointed when August rolls around.
While your instinct may be to estimate in terms of how much time different projects will take, humans are notoriously terrible at estimating time. Estimating by size or complexity can be a much better ways to think about the work logically. So try t-shirt sizing your projects!
Humans are notoriously terrible at estimating time.
Think about each project and how complex it is to complete, then assign each project a t-shirt size from Extra-Small to Extra-Large. So polishing up a revise and resubmit you are mostly finished with might be a XS, a article you want to write that includes doing all the data analysis and lit review work might be an XL. Finally, looking at the relative complexity of your projects, decide your priorities and select which you can focus on for the summer.
The projects you don’t select aren’t going anywhere and will be there when you have time to get back to them. But by taking them off the list and focusing on what you can realistically accomplish, you will be more likely to see progress on your goals!
I love icons. Such handy little communication tools – less cheesy than emoticons but can still convey a lot of information in just a few drawn lines.
If you are regular Agile Faculty blog reader, you see my use of icons regularly in the featured images for each post and sometimes in the posts themselves. I use them mostly to tag to blog post categories, but it evolves as categories change – I recently added a summer icon as a featured image as well.
I use Noun Project exclusively for my icons*. The site is easy to use and fun to explore. Designers post their icon designs on the site and are paid for the downloads or the attribution. I pay for the pro version because you can download as many icons as you want into different colors without attribution. The free version is still great, but you’ll need to include the attribution for the designer whenever you use it (which the designers deserve!).
It’s also just fun to type words into the search and see what comes out. Here are three of my favorite wacky ones – what’s your guess for what they represent?
(*This is not a paid advertisement/endorsement for Noun Project; I just really like the site.)
The end of an academic year can bring on all the feels – good ones and not-so-good ones. Seeing our students succeed and graduate, reading (hopefully) exciting final projects, celebrating the year’s accomplishments are fun ways to wrap up and put a bow on the year. But at the same time, grading, justifying grades to students, navigating requests for an extension or extra credit can wear on us, especially if we’ve been teaching long enough to have seen and heard it all before.
I have been teaching undergraduates for 17 consecutive years as a professor and teacher of record when I was a graduate student. And I will fully admit that the longer I teach, the easier it is to forget just how much life is happening to my students behind the scenes that impacts how they interact with us. We get older, but our students stay the same age–exactly where they should be personally and developmentally. Often what I’m experiencing just comes down to good, old-fashioned compassion fatigue.
You have permission to feel compassion fatigue, acknowledge it, and and find ways to recharge.
Common in the caring disciplines like healthcare, teaching, and crisis work, compassion fatigue can build up and settle in when we regularly deal with other people’s emotional, physical, or societal pain. Compassion and empathy fatigue are colloquialisms used instead of the more academic secondary traumatic stress disorder. Symptoms include feeling burdened by others’ pain, sleeplessness, hopelessness, difficulty concentrating, physical and mental fatigue, among others. Here is a (non-diagnostic!!) self-test you can take to see if you might be experiencing compassion fatigue. See the video below as well. (NOTE: these are also symptoms of depression and burnout, so see a mental health professional if these symptoms seem severe).
For the purpose of this post, I just want to define the term and link to some resources. And I want to acknowledge with you that this feeling is a real, valid, often unconscious reaction to working so closely with students. It’s OK to feel that fatigue, but recognize what it is too – a form of emotional exhaustion. As I’ve been told many times over the past two years, you are supposed to put your own oxygen mask on before you help others with theirs. Take time to refresh and recharge – whether it’s a week or a semester – you have permission to take care of yourself.
In my last post, I asked what might be a provocative question in higher ed – what if you took a rest? Before experiencing a period of burnout, as I said in the previous post, I would have laughed in someone’s face if they suggested I took a break to relax and refresh. I mig
ht take a day here and there or a vacation at the beach every few years, but I was always thinking about work, dwelling on what I “should” be doing, and conjuring up new projects that might contribute to my professional reputation. So when I burned out and simply couldn’t run at my usual pace, I had to learn how to rest.
Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (2018, Basic Books) explores how practicing deliberate rest – exercise, sleep, play – can help us get more out of life and our work that working nonstop. He argues that, “When we treat workaholics as heroes, we express a belief that labor rather than contemplation is the wellspring of great ideas…” (p. 29). Mapping a path full of options for introducing deliberate rest in the short-term and long terms, Pang recommends strategies such as having a morning routine, napping, and walking as good for immediate rest, while exercise, depp play, and taking a recovery period can help us deal with stress and burnout over time. He reminds us that “to stay ahead, it’s necessary sometimes to step back. To keep up, it’s good sometimes to slow down” by allowing our active resting brain time to process and make new connections. (p. 225).
This book helped me put into perspective how my overachieving was contributing to an unhealthy lifestyle and make some necessary changes. Definitely worth a read for faculty in the higher ed culture of busy and cult of productivity.
What are your plans for the summer? Are you teaching a summer course? How much research and writing do you hope to get done? How do you plan to recharge after another academic year?
If you’re anything like I was, you had a list an arm-long of projects to write up or revise, courses to plan, new IRBs to write, work-related books to read, etc.
And if you are also like me, you totally over-estimated what you could actually accomplish and start panicking in August that you didn’t get nearly as much done as you wanted to.
But my challenge to you is to TAKE A BREAK – a weekend, a week, a month, whatever you can. What happens if you don’t get get three articles out? If you leave the course planning until August? If you just take the entire month of June or July off to live rather than think about work?
Five years ago, I would have laughed in my own face if I’d asked myself those questions and responded with a long litany of “must-dos and should-dos). But in the last year, I’ve really come to understand the importance of rest – real rest. The work doesn’t go away, but taking care of ourselves ensures we can do that work…just later.
Can you take a break?
Hello, Agile Faculty readers. I would say welcome back, but it’s really me who is coming back. The blog has been dormant since early fall 2018 – I had to deal with the type of life stuff that sneaks up and surprises you, and it’s taken a while to get back to a place where I can feel agile again. But I’ve made some changes (including the red hair) and spend a lot of time on personal growth and
So, the blog will be back up and running regularly now. Expect more discussions of the values and strategies associated with using Scrum to be agile, more book reviews and reading suggestions, more peaks inside my own process of co-editing journal special issue and writing a book proposal, and other tips and tricks to stay Agile.
Be sure to add the blog to your RSS feed option to you get every new post as soon as it launches!
The daily Scrum, often referred to as “stand-up,” is one of the four meetings that frame a sprint in the Scrum process and the only meeting that happens every day. Scrum teams in software development meet every morning of the work week in a pre-defined location in the office to hold the daily Scrum, which Agile coaching guru Lyssa Adkins refers to as a “commitment meeting” rather than a progress meeting. When the team meets, they stand in a circle (so they don’t get too comfortable) and each person answers three questions:
- What have I done since we last met to meet our shared goals?
- What will I do today to meet our shared goals?
- What might I be stuck on or need help with?
As each person answers these questions, the other members of the team simply listen without commenting. The goal of the meeting is make sure everyone is on the same page, committed to shared goals, and willing to ask for and offer help to team members. This transparency makes it easier to build team spirit around shared progress as well as to catch problems early so they can be addressed immediately.
Agile Faculty can use the daily Scrum questions in a variety of ways, and I’ll briefly discuss two here.
For Research and Service: For my research, and sometimes for service responsibilities, I use these questions occasionally, maybe once a week or so, just to do a pulse check for myself. Am I progressing toward my goals? Do I need help with something? Are the goals I’m working toward still my most important goals? This allows me to recenter myself and adjust as necessary. You can also use this with a writing group, lab group, service committee, or department to make sure everyone is working toward forward progress.
For Teaching: When you have students working on a group project, having them do a daily Scrum in class and their outside meetings is a good way to hold students accountable to each other, and the transparency built through answering the three questions allows them to see both progress and problems to be addressed.
Another way I’ve just started using a modified version of the daily Scrum questions is as a freewriting exercise at the beginning of a class period. In the style of a five-minute write, I ask students to answer the following variation on the questions before we begin a class discussion:
- What have I learned since we last met?
- What would I like to learn more about today?
- What questions or concerns do I have going into today’s class?
This activity can prime students for the work we’ll do that day and helps them come up with questions they can ask in class. I’m hoping this might be a good approach for the quieter students in class, giving them the opportunity to jot some thoughts down first rather than being on the spot later.
How might you use the daily Scrum questions in your work?
Usually at this time of year, as the new semester gets underway and I reflect on my summer, I would do a solid review of my accomplishments and a retrospective on my successes and shortcomings with respect to my summer goals. As usual, I had a ton of (unrealistic) writing goals in addition to work on projects under contract and assessment activities for the two program I run. It should have been a productive summer.
On the surface, things were trending upward – my Professional Writing & Rhetoric program had finally become its own major rather than a track in another major, we had a much better handle on the second pilot semester of the Design Thinking Studio in Social Innovation than we did on the first run, Agile Faculty seemed to be selling well. I had ideas for several journal articles I could write across a variety of interests. I was participating in course design groups for design thinking and Honors. I attended a faculty writing retreat with my co-editors to get a handle on our edited collection which is under contract with a prestigious university press. I was planning a disciplinary conference with colleague-friends that we were really excited about. There were lots of things I wanted to do under the Agile Faculty umbrella from developing downloadable resources to starting a podcast. I had a lot to look forward to in May.
This summer, I finally hit my wall.
Very little of it happened. But this isn’t a post about not working enough, or feeling shame and guilt for not working enough (yes, I’ve been reading Brene Brown). This post is a celebration of not being especially productive. Of finally realizing that I don’t have to push myself over a cliff to be productive and professionally content. Of actually being OK with what I’ve accomplished and my right to take a break and work on myself. Of realizing I don’t really have anything to prove to anyone anymore. Of doing absolutely nothing at the beach for a week with my extended family.
This became a summer of self-care.
This became a summer of self-care, which was hard for the first few months, because I don’t know how not to work for an extended period of time. But I learned. I’m still working on it. I still need to figure out how to continue some of the self-care practices I implemented this summer into the rhythm of the semester. I write in Agile Faculty that we need to each be attentive to our own professional goals and the activities, work and home, that keep us vital faculty. This summer, I took my own advice and am a better instructor, colleague, and wife because of it. And now one of my goals is to get a (hurricane-proof) beach house, something different I can work towards as well as my professional goals.
How do you practice self-care?
rebecca pope-ruark 