Collaborative projects, often known as capstone or “applied” projects, typically occur as one of the last parts of a learner’s qualification. What I’m not talking about here is answering some set questions with entirely predictable outcomes over a few days or a couple of weeks where there’s no real requirement to work collaboratively or even to have any sort of relationship beyond superficial with each other. Instead, I’m talking about projects dealing with wicked problems from the real world that frequently lack clarity of aims, constraints and possible or acceptable solutions.
To arrive at viable potential solutions, collaborative projects are structured for learners to work together in project teams. There’s a whole separate conversation that could be had about the differences between groups and teams, and that’s something I will cover in another blog. For now, I’m going to work on the basis that collaborative projects are team projects where members share responsibility, willingly engage in constructive conflict, and mutual decision making in pursuit of innovative solutions to the problems they are working on.
I want to share what I think are four of the most important positive power and value outcomes from collaborative projects (for learners).
You (probably) get to do something you are really interested in. Depending on how the course has been structured, and how much choice you get about project selection, you could end up working on something that you can get really excited about. Be alert for the projects that say something matching your interests. Collaborative projects should be about more than just getting enough marks to pass a course so you can graduate. They’re an opportunity for you to do something that really matters, something you care about. Whether your project is for a commercial or community organisation, or geared more towards wider society, changes can happen because you are interested enough and care enough to help make them possible. We all know this thing – what people are interested in; they are more likely to invest more of themselves in doing well. At the end of the project, as well as completing something you care about, you’ve also got a great entry on your CV that helps you showcase what you are capable of making happen in the world outside the classroom – you are more than “a person who read some books at school” – you are a practical and informed changemaker.
You get to USE and grow knowledge from other courses doing something that’s real. Problem solving and decision-making become practical skills rather than just theoretical knowledge, because what they are doing has real consequences. This goes for both the hard (technical) and soft (people) skills. It’s not like playing a game where you can just push the “Reset” button and play again if you don’t like the outcome this time. Most of the answers you are looking for can’t be taken “off the shelf”, so you learn with actual, rather than totally predictable circumstances out of some “ideal” textbook. There’s no way for you to fake doing the right things and being effective – these things happen through actual practice and repetition.
You get to discover things about yourself you might not otherwise have appreciated. If you think about yourself as the subject of a SWOT analysis, the collaborative project is a great context for thinking about your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Use what you discover to celebrate and grow your positives, and plan for minimising the effects of any negatives. Nobody else should be expecting you to be perfect, and you shouldn’t expect it of yourself. There will have been things about you that were awesome even before your collaborative project involvement started so your personal discoveries, whether or not they are surprising, are about enhancing your awesomeness.
You (sometimes) get to develop friendships that go way beyond simply tolerating your fellow team members professionally. Collaborative projects can be pretty intense experiences where people get to know each other in ways that otherwise might never happen. You get to see each other “warts and all”, finding out who you can trust to be there for you when times or tasks are tough. That’s not just about the project, either – it’s a meeting of hearts and minds, where the project is the thing that brought you together, but not the thing that keeps you together. I have one collaborative project friendship, which I consider one of my most valuable friendships of all, that now stretches back 20 years. We might not physically meet each other as often as we used to, but physical meetings aren’t the defining characteristic of the friendship, or why it’s so valuable.
In my next blog, I will look at the power and value proposition from the viewpoint of the project/course facilitator.
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Rob Nelson Education 