HERDSA 2012: Session 1 notes – Peer Assisted Teaching Schemes

Posted: July 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The second talk I went to in session 1 was more work on A/Professor Angela Carbone’s work in Peer Assisted Teaching Schemes, for which she has highly awarded and, for 2013, will be taking up a senior fellowship at the national level to continue this work. Congratulations, Ange! The subtitle of the talk was “A Way of Creating and Developing New Connections”.

There is a lot of support for new academics in terms of induction and teacher preparation but what about those educators who are already established but have units that are in need of reform or reduce? Who do they turn to in order to get help? What if you just want to adopt new technologies and you’ve been in the game for decades? Who can you ask for help? The core of the PATS work is that we need to think about teaching standards, more experienced staff, transition issues, risks, and new technology.

We are constantly being assessed – CEQ, SETU/SELT, lots of controversy around these instruments. Arts and Humanities seem to appear better than physical sciences, and there is not much research from either side to answer the question ‘why?’ Do student evaluations measure student outcomes or teacher effectiveness? According to the research, they don’t actually measure either. The use of these things for management addds stress to academics and their school – people get stressed when they even just use these measures in their class.

So, if we’re stressed, struggling and trying to adapt, it’s pretty obvious that we need help but the question is “where does this help come from?

What is PATS: academics within a faculty are partnered together and follow an informal process to discuss strategies to improve unit quality and develop educational innovations.

Aim:

  • to improve student satisfaction with units
  • improve the quality of teaching
  • to build leadership capacity amongst teachers.

A mentor and mentee are linked in a reciprocal partnership. The theoretical basis this comes from a large number of sources including Vygotsky, Lave, Gratch and Boud, looking at our teaching through four lenses, after Brookfield 1995. The four lenses are: the student view, the theoretical view, the autobiographical view and the colleague’s view, where another academic can serve as a critical friend.

The relationship between mentor and mentee begins before the semester, where the relationship is developed, with ongoing catch up sessions through the semester, discussion and review, including subsidised coffee meetings, culminating in a critical review (with a friendly perspective) and self-reflection. This is looking at all of the aspects with a critical eye but alongside someone that you now have a relationship with – a critical friend to assist you in your own reflection. However, within this, there are workshops and deliverables to make sure that both parties are actually working in and at the relationship – it’s not a free coffee club.

I can’t summarise all of the PATS work in one post but I think we can all identify people around us who might fall into this category: people who might need help but are outside of the traditional bootstrapping systems that we employ. A/Prof Carbone also commented that there were people that were taking part who were looking to improve good courses to really good ones, rather than just trying to fix courses that had been identified as under-performing. This was helping to reduce any lingering stigma at being in a PATS relationship with someone. Some of the unexpected results included the mentors and mentees forming a relationship that allowed them to work together on research and development beyond the designated course improvement.

In the framework of this conference, which is all about connections and community, it’s obvious that PATS is helping to link people together, making connections and building community. There are lots of works to read on this, and I enjoy reading through the theoretical underpinnings as well. (Plus, you know I’m a Vygotsky fan…) I already knew about this work but it’s always interesting to see how it’s evolving and developing.

Happy Bolivian Teacher Appreciation Day

Posted: June 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Wiphala of Qollasuyu: the banner of the native people of the Andes and official co-flag of Bolivia. Happy Teachers’ Day for all of those of you show would rather use this flag!

Ok, I’ll be honest. I saw a link to the US Teacher Appreciation Day and, because I read it too quickly, I thought it was going to be on the 8th of June rather than the 8th of May. Today I was going to talk about how important it is to recognise the value and contribution of teachers every day – especially for me as someone who gets students after 12 years of successful learning! (World Teachers’ Day is on October the 5th, if you’re curious.)

However, instead, I went to look up if anyone actually had today as their national teaching day and, fortunately for me, it turns out that Bolivia celebrates their Teachers’ Day today (Wikipedia link). (Where today is in Australian time zones, sorry, confused people reading this on the 5th and saying “Martha! That boy’s gone mad again!”)

Happy Teachers’ Day, Bolivian Teachers! (Bolivian Flag)

But reading through that Wikipedia page made me appreciate how differently, including sincerely, we value teachers. Sometimes it’s part of a “Teachers’ Week”, sometimes it stands alone. Sometimes gifts are given, except where this might amount to bribery so the schools get closed (citation seriously needed here, because that’s a very big claim to base on a Wikipedia article!) Sometimes teachers get the day off, or half day off.

Some countries have students visiting their past and present teachers to bring gifts or show their appreciation. Apparently, in some countries, teachers get together and celebrate their profession by going out.

It doesn’t really matter what is done, after all, as long as the activity is sincere and recognises the teacher for teaching you well, listening, helping or contributing to your progress. But I really like the idea of teachers themselves getting together to say “Yeah! We’re teachers! We do an important job and we are doing it well. Hooray for us!”

There’s no worse way to celebrate a day by making a token gesture – it’s really better not to. (Any secretaries out there who have received a joke t-shirt that says “I’m with stupid” on Secretary’s Day know what I’m talking about.) But it’s not about being recognised by other people, it’s about taking the time to look back at your year and think about everything that’s happened. It’s about recognising what you have done, despite resourcing issues, increasing pressure, decreasing salaries and a changing world.

It’s about thinking about what it means to be a teacher – whether you are a student or a teacher.

So, teachers, wherever you are, have a happy Bolivian Teachers’ Appreciation Day and a good year to come.

We Expect Commitment – That’s Why We Have to Commit As Well.

Posted: May 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m currently in Cupertino, California, to talk about how my University (or, to be precise, a Faculty in my University), starting using iPads in First Year by giving them to all starting students. As a result, last night I found myself at a large table on highly committed and passionate people in Education, talking about innovative support mechanisms for students.

Pizza and beer – Fuelling educational discussions since forever. (I love the Internet: I didn’t take any pictures of my food but a quick web-search for BJ’s Pizza Cupertino quickly turned up some good stuff.)

I’ve highlighted committed and passionate because it shows why those people are even at this meeting in the first place – they’re here to talk about something very cool that has been done for students, or a solution that has fixed a persistent or troublesome problem. From my conversations so far, everyone has been fascinated by what everyone else is doing and, in a couple of cases, I was taking notes furiously because it’s all great stuff that I want to do when I get home.

We expect our students to be committed to our courses: showing up, listening, contributing, collaborating, doing the work and getting the knowledge. We all clearly understand that passion makes that easier. Some students may have a sufficiently good view of where they want to go, when they come in, that we can draw on their goal drive to keep them going. However, a lot don’t, and even those who do have that view often turn out to have a slightly warped view of what their goal reality actually is. So, anything we can do to keep a student’s momentum going, while they work out what their goals and passions actually are, and make a true commitment to our courses, is really important.

And that’s where our commitment and passion come into things. As you may know, I travel a lot and, honestly, that’s pretty draining. However, after being awake for 33 hours after a trans-Pacific flight, I was still awake, alert and excited, sitting around last night talking to anyone who would listen with the things that we’re doing which are probably worth sharing. Much more importantly, I was fired up and interested to talk to the people around me who talking about the work that had been put in to make things work for students, the grand visions, the problems that had been overcome and, importantly, they could easily show me what they’d been doing because, in most cases, these systems are highly accessible in a mobile environment. Passion and commitment in my colleagues keeps me going and helps me to pass it on to my students.

Students always know if you’re into what you’re doing. Honestly, they do. Accepting that is one of the first steps to becoming a good teacher because it does away with that obstructive hypocrisy layer that bad teachers tend to cling to. This has to be more than a single teacher outlook though. Modern electronic systems for student support, learning and teaching, require the majority of educators to be involved in your institution. If you say “This is something you should do, please use it” and very few other lecturers do – who do the students believe? Because if they believe you, then your colleagues look bad (whether they should or not, I leave to you). If they believe your colleagues then you are wasting your effort and you’re going to get really frustrated. What about if half the class does and half doesn’t?

We’re going through some major strategic reviews at the moment back home and it’s really important that, whatever our new strategy on electronic support for learning and teaching is, it has to be something that the majority of staff and students can commit to, with results and participation drive or reward their passions. (It’s a good thing we’ve got some time to develop this, because it’s a really big ask!)

The educational times are most definitely a-changin’. (Sorry, I’m in California.) We’ve all seen what happens when new initiatives are pushed through, rather than guided through or introduced with strong support. Some time ago, I ran across a hierarchy of commitment that uses terms that I like, so I’m going to draw from that now. The terms are condemnation, complaint, compliance and commitment.

If we jam stuff through (new systems, new procedures, compulsory participation in on-line activities) without the proper consultation and preparation, we risk high levels of condemnation or under-mining from people who feel threatened or disenfranchised. Even if it’s not this bad, we may end up with people who just complain about it – Why should I? Who’s going to tell me to? Some people are just going to go along with it but, let’s face it, compliance is not the most inspirational mental state. Why are you doing it? Because someone told me to and I just thought I should go along with it.

We want commitment! I know what I’m doing. I agree with what I’m doing. I have chosen to not just take part but to do so willingly and I’m implicitly going to try and improve what’s going on. We want in our students, we want it in our colleagues. To get that in our colleagues for some of the new education systems is going to take a lot of discussion, a lot of thinking, a lot of careful design and some really good implementation, including honest and open review of what works and what doesn’t. It’s also going to take an honest and open discussion of the kind of workload involved to (a) produce everything properly as a set-up cost and (b) the ongoing costs in terms of workload, physical resources and time for staff, organisations and students.

So, if we want commitment from our students, then we must have commitment from our staff, which means that we who are involved in system planning and design have to commit in turn. I’m committed enough to come to California for about 8 more hours than I’m spending on planes here and back again. That, however, means nothing unless I show real commitment and take good things back to my own community, spend time and effort in carefully crafting effective communication for my students and colleagues, and keep on chasing it up and putting the effort in until something good is achieved.

Back in the Saddle: Getting Students Talking.

Posted: April 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I gave my first “non-intensive mode” lecture in weeks on Monday and it was a blast. I’ve already mentioned that it was on Ethics and I do enjoy teaching that. I regularly throw to the class with “Hey, what do you think about this – 1 minute, give me an answer, talk to your neighbour. Go!” and then wander about. While I’m wandering, I’m not worried about the students who are all talking – that’s what I want – I’m looking for the students who are sitting by themselves.

Generally, where possible, I’ll try and nudge the geographically isolated students together – you know, when one is sitting in row 3, then there’s a huge gap and there’s another in row 7 – but I try to do this before the lecture gets going. Once you’ve got all of our gear out, you don’t want to move and, if you do, you drop stuff and – well, it’s a mess.

Some people, of course, just don’t want to play. They won’t sit with other people, they won’t talk, they won’t interact unless I address them directly and then stand and wait for them to answer. Now this has to be done very carefully because you don’t want to get into a staring match or an intimidation play with a student, so it has to stay light but it has to be obvious that you’re not going away. Now, I’m sure some of you are thinking “why is he picking on the introverts” and, frankly, that’s a valid concern for all of us. I watch body language like a hawk and I know the difference between “not really wanting to play” and “about to bolt”. If someone answers me in any way, I’ll build that into what I’m talking about. If someone can’t make eye contact or is making serious avoidance signals at me, I’ll back off and cover it by flicking to a neighbour who looks keen. At that point, everyone gets (rightly) concerned I’m going to flick to them and I’ve taken the heat right off my original student. Humour, injected generically and NEVER directed at the student, can sometimes defuse the situation. It’s more risky than not, in my opinion, so unless you know that you’re a comedy genius and you have major awards for your empathetic handling of hostage situations, best stick to redirecting class attention in other ways.

I don’t see many really shy or introverted people who won’t take part at all in my lectures but, then again, I’m really keen on setting up a non-judgemental and constructive environment where everyone can have their say, without fear of being ridiculed. I’ve only rarely had to deal with unpleasant students but I’ll do it – and I think my students know that they can depend upon that.

My real concern is always with communication ability and the desire to communicate. Before anyone thinks I’m having a go at International students, I’m not. The range of linguistic ability, social awareness and skill in communication rungs the gamut across all of my student groups, regardless of origin. Yes, students with English as a second language can struggle a bit but I provide recordings of my lectures and I have become much more adept at understanding accented English – remember: their English is far better than my Farsi/Urdu/Mandarin/Hokkien/Bahaya/German/… Yes, there can be cultural barriers to participation but, then again, that’s true of mature age students not wanting to look silly in front of the young ‘uns. Or person X in front of person Y, for almost all values of X and Y, including X==Y! (The ultimate generalisation, you saw it here first.)

What I find helps is to provide the following structure to assist, encourage and sustain participation in lectures:

  1. Provide a clear context
    Let the students know the area in which the activity, questions or whatever will be taking place. Give them hooks to hang their answers on. You want their first answers to be in the ballpark of right, so you can lead them closer. In sufficient context will give you answers that don’t really lead anywhere and that makes your job much harder.
  2. Start simple
    Start with short phrases, show of hands, yes/no. Once the class is warm, get longer, get discursive, write things on paper. Walking in and, first thing, asking a question that needs a two-minute answer may not work with most classes.
  3. Build constructively
    Almost any answer can lead somewhere good, assuming you’ve got point 1 down. Take it and run with it. A lot of students already think that they’re wrong and we want them to confident, and accurately confident, about being right so we try and build a massive structure of beautiful knowledge out of an enormous set of tolerably reasonable bricks. Encouraging students to feel values makes spaces friendly, supportive and collaborative. You can get a great collaboration going in a terrible space if you have the right environment. The best lecture theatre or collar suite in the world is going to be silent if you say “No, try again.” whenever a student says anything.
  4. Activate damage control
    Having said that, sometimes you need to lead people back to the righteous path. Sometimes you need to stop discussions. Religion, politics, gender issues, etc cannot be injected – unless that’s what you’re talking about. Even in my ethics course I deliberately framed it as a non-judgemental environment, where I wasn’t testing moral compasses, I was assessing thinking. Any sniff of heated argument and I would have been in there, redirecting, repurposing and juggling like mad. If things are going really, really badly – stop the activity. It helps to have something up your sleeve but you’re always better to stop before someone says or does something that really screws up their lives. We’re not in loco parentis but we still have that role of pastoral care.
  5. Take a risk or two
    Students love seeing us out on the edge. Whether it’s solving an unseen problem or trying an in-class activity that might go wrong – the fact that you’re willing to try stuff goes a long way to encourage students to try stuff, too. I think there’s an aspect of mutual confidence that develops there. Having said that, PREPARE YOUR STUFF. 🙂 There’s a world of difference between a touch of risk and trying to run the whole course on a scrap of paper. The latter is not effective. (Unless you’re very, very good and I’ve never met anyone who could actually pull that off – although several thought that they could.)

This is what works for me – what works for you?

The ACID test: Teaching With Examples From Other Areas

Posted: March 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I’ve just returned from teaching an intensive module on Distributed Systems – no, don’t go, I have a point for everyone, not just the Computer Scientists in the audience. Dealing with computations that take place over several computers can be tricky because it can be difficult for everyone to agree whether all the things that they wanted to happen have actually happened. Combine that with the problems that occur when two or more people try to change the same thing at the same time and we need a strong mechanism to deal with it. The properties that refer to this are usually represented with the acronym ACID.

A sign that says Danger Acid

We use something called a transactional model – what we’re trying to achieve either happens or, if there’s a problem, we make it as if it never occurred (we call this atomicity). When we make change we want to keep the overall system consistent with regard to some key requirements (consistency). If two things are happening at once, but could fail, we set it up so that they don’t take account of each other’s changes until we’re sure that they’ve finished and are going to hang around (isolation). Finally, speaking of hanging around, once we’ve made something stick, we want it to stay stuck – that’s durability.

Why have I covered this? Because I want you to understand how I can take ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) out of computer science and make students think about it in a different framework – that of the legal system. Here’s the question I posed to my students as part of a tutorial:

“Using Transaction Properties (ACID), discuss whether a person simultaneously accused of two crimes should be tried, in both cases, as if only one crime had been committed.”

Now this doesn’t seem related, but the complex issues in the presumption of innocence, not declaring previous crimes until sentencing and the nature of appeal can lead to a quite complicated and involved discussion. I like to start students off by getting them to think about the problem individually and asking questions to clear up any definitional problems. Then they go to their neighbour, then into small groups of 4-5. By the time we’re done the rooms full of discussion and we bring it together to illustrate that thinking about the problem in this way gets us away from memorised jargon inside the originating discipline and forces students to describe the situation based on their understanding of the concept.

This is a third year course so the question is designed to make people think – there are some answers that are better than others but almost all pathways based on careful thought will head towards a good answer.

Stepping outside the original discipline can be fun and useful – just make sure that you’re keeping the analogies accurate, precise and not too far from the original material. Hope this is useful to you!

Do you have your teaching buddy?

Posted: January 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

How are you developing and maintaining your learning and teaching support network? Do you have one, formally or informally? Thinking about it right now, can you name at least one person you can turn to, to bounce ideas off, to proof-read things, to discuss research with?

If not, then you need one! With a support network of even one person you’ve got someone else to talk to, to sanity check you, to help you laugh when things aren’t funny and to balance you if you’re going off-kilter.

It doesn’t need to be someone in your own discipline, although that can help, but it does need to be someone who understands what it is like to be an educator. There’s a lot of gallows humour, of joking about the things that are making us despair, and sometimes other people, especially partners, don’t get how we can complain about something so much and still love it so much. That’s where your teaching buddy comes in. With any luck you have more than one, you have a network of these people. These are not just the people whose blogs you read or whose books you have, these are people you can message or mail to ask a question or grab a coffee with or just sit down and have a long “GRAAAAA” chat with – without losing your job.

Sometimes teaching feels like an us-and-them kind of job. Us is always us, but them can be our students, or our administrators, or our bosses. You don’t want to gang up on any of these people but, at the same time, you don’t want to find yourself crawling the walls. Apart from anything else, working on cool projects is always more fun with a friend to help out, to throw ideas around with and to just sit down and talk to.

Do you have a network? Do you know someone who doesn’t? Can you reach out to try and help?

Are you working alone? Is there someone you could ask, anywhere? Have a look around, there are lots of professional networks – conferences and workshops are a great place to meet like-minded people. It’s ok, we’re not talking about marrying these people, you can even, if you’re so inclined, look at it as a very casual speed-dating set-up if you’re nervous. But you’ll be amazed how many people out there are ready to talk, want to talk and, working together, we can probably all achieve that little bit more.

 

 

 

Surviving and thriving on collaboration.

Posted: January 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Juggling all of the things that you’re supposed to do as a University academic can be tricky. The traditional academic is supposed to conduct large amounts of valuable, cited and grant-rewarded research, be an exemplary and inspirational teacher, and also find time to sit on lots of committees, fill out forms and not get in the way, too much, of the central administration process. As a junior academic, you’ll sit on fewer committees but you may, instead, get admin jobs like ‘collecting the software requirements’ or ‘looking after the casual teaching budget’, so there’s always something to do.

The biggest mistake a lot of people make is trying to do it all themselves. Yes, you must be involved with these tasks, you will be responsible for their successful completion, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t consult other people to help, or involve them for collaboration, or bring other people in when the scale of what you’re trying to do might crush you.

The quick summary of this post is that if you get good at collaborating with other people, and you can set up a relationship that is on a roughly equal footing, then everyone benefits. However, you need to work out what each person is bringing and who is the right person to involve.

You can read a lot of self-help books that, effectively, boil down to “making it appear as if there is more than one of you”. When you can set things up so that you put in some vital, required, element, but then the heavy lifting or continued presence is handled elsewhere, then you’ve achieved this because you can then devote yourself elsewhere. Some things require you to be there the whole time: your own wedding, any event where you are supposed to be the speaker (which includes lecturing) and a lot of meetings. Some other things on our long to-do list require us to be involved, but not necessarily to be the sole operator. Let’s start by looking at research.

Research, in terms of finding ideas, pursuing ideas, getting results, writing them up and publishing them, is a time-intensive activity that requires reasonably long stretches of uninterrupted time to get the best results. Unless you have a research-only position, or you’re on sabbatical, that’s very hard to achieve. However, this doesn’t mean that we can’t do it and we don’t necessarily have to sacrifice all of our weekends to do it. (Seriously, though, you’re going to lose some leisure time here and there. Academia is not a 9-5 job.)

One of the big advantages of having research collaborators is that your research and its publication, hence visibility and possible grant success, is always moving forward. These collaborators might be colleagues in a research group, research fellows, post docs, research assistants and PhD students (in later stages) and most of these, especially people who are paid to research, can keep the flow going when you’re tied up having to be in another place.

All these staff sound fine but this assumes that you’ve had the success required to employ all of these people! So how do we start down this track?

The answer is collaboration: finding people who are doing similar things so that you have more than one of you working on research, papers and grant applications. Look around inside your own school, or faculty, and work out if you have something that you’ve done that, combined with someone else’s work or input, can give you both some benefit if you work together. Ideally, the effort expended by each of you is approximately 50-70% of the effort required individually but still achieves the outcome. The more you work together, the more synergy that you’re likely to achieve because you start to have small copies of each other in your heads.

The same is true for learning and teaching based research and development. Can you find someone who also wants to do what you’re doing and can you work together so that you achieve the same result with less individual effort? Can you find someone to bounce those early ideas off to get better ideas forming?

We all know that your students learn more when they’re excited and engaged and discussing things with their peers. Research success can be achieved on the same basis. If your research is rewarding and you have someone to bounce it off, someone who can enthuse you or bring it back on track, you will do more and you will achieve more.

Forming a collaboration should be rewarding and all parties should benefit from it. Some collaborations stop after one effort, because one side or the other feels that they have been exploited. Yes, sometimes this happens, but you’ll quickly work out who you can and can’t work with. Forming successful collaborations early on, before you have the money to employ your own continuity providers, makes your job more manageable and allows you to bring more of yourself to other places, including your home life.

Here’s my (not exhaustive) list of things to think about when setting up a collaboration:

  1. What are you going to do? You should know what the task or project is, including every subtask you can think of, so there are no surprises later on.
  2. Who is involved? Work out who you are working with and have them involved from the start.
  3. What is everyone doing? Who is responsible for what?
  4. How much is everyone bringing to the arrangement? Resources, time, people or goodwill – cards on the table up front to avoid disappointment.
  5. When is everything due? Know your internal and external deadlines.
  6. How often will you meet? Will you be minuting things, e-mailing, using wikis or just having chats to keep track?
  7. How will credit be allocated? If it’s a paper, what does the author list look like? How could it change? If it’s a grant, what’s the money division?
  8. Do you have to worry about IP or commercialisation? If so, this gets tricky fast and makes 4 and 7 more complex. Sort this out BEFORE someone runs off with the IP and founds MicroGoogleII.
  9. Evaluation. How will we know that this worked for us and if we should continue? Sounds premature but if you have a rough idea of what you think denotes a successful collaboration, and you discuss it early on, then everyone knows the rough behaviour that’s expected.

Finally, here’s my list of 5 things to look out for as possible warning signs that your collaboration is not as solid as it could be.

  1. The other party has a lot of equipment resources and makes them available to you but does no actual research or writing, they just expect credit. Credit as an acknowledgement on a paper or grant app is one thing, expecting lead authorship or a slice of the funding is another. This isn’t always invalid but it’s almost always cleaner to pay cash money for resources, or resource access, and remove any doubt about credit. (A senior person who demands lead authorship regardless of involvement is much harder to manage here. That’s a political problem I leave to you although I might try and comment on it later.)
  2. Your collaborators have lots of ideas but never seem to produce anything. However, after five meetings, when you present the final work, they will still expect full credit for their ideas, regardless of the quality or usefulness. If you’re a non-producing ideas person, then other people will be just as grumpy with you. There are ideas and then there are ideas.
  3. Your collaborators rewrite everything that you submit, or redo the design, or experimentation, because it’s not up to ‘their standards’ or they just feel like it. I’m not saying that they or you are wrong – but your expectations aren’t aligned and one of you is going to get frustrated quickly.
  4. Deadlines slip or you end up in a deadline-chasing model that doesn’t work for you. Some people like to work in a panic close to the deadline, some don’t. If working up until the minute before hand-in is your thing, but gives your collaborator heartburn, don’t expect the relationship to survive. If you and your group can’t agree upon whether deadlines are really important or not, the stress risks breaking the relationship.
  5. You walk away from most of the meetings wondering why you bothered. If either of you is thinking that, you have to either address it up-front or finish what you’re doing, tie it up and find someone else to work with. Discussing it might be able to save the relationship (some people just don’t realise what they’re doing) but always be ready to close off your project neatly and start again elsewhere.

Collaboration is a fantastic way to get more results for less effort by recognising that people can work well together and, carefully controlled, it is the ultimate tool for junior academics to make it to being more senior (and tenured) academics. Just go into it with open eyes and be frank in your early discussions and it will work for you, rather than becoming a cautionary tale for the future.

Happy collaboration!

 

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