Industry Fellows: An Adopter’s handbook
Josh Tenenberg, University of Washington, Tacoma
Version: August 9, 2010
The Industry Fellows program pairs a university teacher and a professional practitioner to teach a course together. The faculty member has broad expertise in the discipline, deep expertise in teaching, and local knowledge about students and the university context. Practicing computing professionals, on the other hand, have up-to-date knowledge of specific technical areas of practice, expertise in making pragmatic trade-offs to meet workaday constraints, and skill in navigating organizational culture. By working together, the Industry Fellows program exploits what each does best. The faculty member retains full responsibility for all academic aspects of the course: planning and writing the syllabus, developing the assignments and examinations, and assigning grades. The practicing professional (i.e. the industry fellow) joins the faculty member in the classroom or remotely via electronic communication on a regular basis, interacts directly with the students, and evaluates a sample of the student work on an advisory basis. Targeted courses are those tied closely to professional practice. In these courses, students produce tangible representations of authentic practice, which serve to mediate the interaction between students, the teacher, and the practicing professional.
This document provides some guidelines for how to adopt Industry Fellows, from choosing a course and an industry professional, to jointly planning the course, to structuring the class sessions to take full advantage of the professional. The intended audience is a faculty member in higher education. "You" refers to the faculty member. "Industry Fellows" (title caps) refers to the program, and "industry fellows" (lowercase) refers to a person serving in a particular role.
Core Principles
There is a set of actions that characterizes Industry Fellows. Adopting Industry Fellows occurs when these actions are carried out. Each is presented roughly in the sequential order in which they are brought into play when adopting Industry Fellows. The rationale for each, its elaboration, and examples from previous instantiations of Industry Fellows follows in its own section.
Learning as participation
Industry Fellows is founded on principles from sociocultural studies of psychology and learning (Cole 1996, Rogoff 2003, Lave & Wenger 1991, Salomon 1997, Robbins & Aydede 2008). The key perspective is that “ ‘to learn’ means to participate more successfully in the collective practices that define particular ways of knowing as recognized by various communites.” Such communities are defined not only by geography. Some are occupational communities (Van Maanen & Barley 1984) that arise among people who share occupational roles.
In Industry Fellows, there are two paired occupational communities: university academics and professional practitioners. Each is distinguished by the goals and constraints associated with their respective communities, and by the physical and material settings in which the work occurs, What these communities share in common is a language and tools associated with a field of practice. Examples of paired occupational communities are lawyers and law professors, engineers and engineering professors, software developers and computer science professors, and nurses and nursing professors.
Some of these professors may still be practicing professionals within their field. But the specialization of most modern universities requires that they develop expertise within communities of academics. With the demands of teaching, research, and service, professors are not usually able to maintain their identity and technical skills within the professional practitioner community of the field.
Academic work, however, constitutes its own set of practices. For example, just as there is expertise in developing state-of-art software, there is expertise in facilitating the learning of software development among students. While academics may no longer “walk the walk” that comes from daily practice in the field, they are likely to be able to still “talk the talk” based on their past education and experience, and ongoing reading and discussion with practitioners. This interactional expertise (Collins & Evans 2009) serves as a common ground among the industry/academic collaborators that co-teach in Industry Fellows.
In Industry Fellows each member of the teaching team is not so much transmitting content as they are enculturating students into the practices of their respective communities. Further, the academic and the professional practitioner enculturate one another into their respective practice communities.
Choose the right course
Not all courses are appropriate for Industry Fellows. Introductory courses and heavily theoretical courses are generally bad candidates. Instead, choose a course with the following characteristics:
Another indicator for the “right” course is if the course is (or can be) project-based. Project-based courses have been shown to increase student self-directed activity and motivation for engagement (Blumenfeld et al 1991). Blumenfeld et al define project-based courses as having two key characteristics: “They require a question or problem that serves to organize and drive activities; and these activities result in a series of artifacts, or products, that culminate in a final product that addresses the driving question.”
Choose industry fellows with intrinsic motivation
Intrinsic motivation is a self-determined impetus for goal-directed activity. Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is a punishment or inducement to act that comes either from outside the individual or has been internalized by an individual. When people are intrinsically motivated, they engage in activity because of the pleasure and enjoyment that they receive from the activity itself--the doing is its own reward. There is little controversy in the scientific record: extrinsic motivators reduce intrinsic motivation (Deci et al 1999). “Despite our abiding faith in incentives as a way to influence behavior in a positive way, they consistently do the reverse” (Schwartz 2009). Not only do extrinsic motivators reduce intrinsic motivation, they often reduce the quality of what is produced. “[P]eople will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself—and not by external pressures” (Amabile 1998).
It is therefore important to choose industry fellows with a desire to participate, since they are more likely to follow-through on their participation and to gain from the experience. It is unlikely that you will find sufficient funds to pay the industry fellow the market value of their time; trying to do so may cause harm by converting their altruistic impulses to a commercial transaction. Rather than provide them money, provide them with feedback about the positive impact their work is having on the students and yourself. In addition, some industry fellows may appreciate a formal appointment (e.g. I have used both “Visiting Scholar” and “Industry Fellow” for past fellows) that is formalized by a letter from your department head or Dean.
Intrinsic motivation to participate is usually evidenced by some combination of 1) their choosing to participate freely (they are not pressured or coerced into doing so), and they feel they have some freedom in what they contribute, 2) participation will develop a competence that is important to them (e.g. they want to get better at teaching skills, or find out more about teaching in higher ed), and 3) participation connects them to a larger project or goal that is personally meaningful (Deci & Ryan 2000) (e.g. they want to improve undergraduate education in the discipline). Red flags that argue against participation are industry professionals who feel that they are supposed to represent their employer or employer's product or who are pushing their own commercial product, or who are primarily seeking to recruit students as employees or interns (though it may be fine if this is a secondary goal).
Explicitly negotiate the time commitment
The involvement of an industry fellow requires a commitment of involvement before, during, and after an academic term. But different industry fellows will have different needs and different constraints. Some might wish for considerable opportunity to interact with students in the classroom, while others can afford only small amounts of time on a week by week basis. Regardless, the involvement of the industry professional should be negotiated up front. This need not be done at the first meeting, but it should be done relatively soon in your planning. A minimum participation by an industry fellow is around 2 hours prior to the first class meeting, attending 2 class sessions for at least one hour during term (one early and one late), 30 minutes per week during the academic term., and one hour after the term has ended. The maximum is probably 8 hours of participation prior to the first class session (spread across several weeks or a few months), attending one class session per week, 15 additional minutes for debriefing/planning each week, and 2 hours after the term has ended. Anything between these probably works, and there is room for flexibility in the industry fellow's involvement throughout the term. Making explicit commitments not only helps both parties plan appropriately, the very act of making the commitment publicly increases the likelihood that it will be carried out (Ostrom et al. 1994).
Divide the labor along lines of expertise
Because of differences in context, materials, tools, and goals, practitioners in non-academic settings will develop considerably different expertise than academics. When paired in Industry Fellows, it is therefore important to divide labor along lines of expertise.
Experts possess deep domain knowledge (Chi et al 1988). They additionally bring this knowledge to bear on problems in the field, self-monitor their work, and work with speed and dexterity (Felton 2007). Experts develop prodigious skill and sensitivity in choosing and working with materials and tools (Harper 1987), and adapt these to changing contexts (Rose 2004). Experts also gain considerable local knowledge about the organizational settings in which they work (Kusterer 1978). Even in highly technical areas such as photocopy repair, experts must develop a sophisticated repertoire of strategies for managing the complexities of human interaction (Orr 1996). Practicing professionals thus have considerable expertise that they can bring to bear within the educational setting.
At the same time, it is easy for teachers (and others) to take for granted their own expertise. As important as domain knowledge is to teaching (Bransford et al. 2001), equally important is pedagogical knowledge that teachers learn through practice, and pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman 1986) about how to teach particular content. Shulman (1986) defines pedagogical content knowledge as “the most useful forms of representation of those ideas, the most powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations-in a word, the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others." Teachers also develop considerable local knowledge (Geertz 1983) about the context in which they teach, about such things as the resources available within their universities and classrooms, the frequency and duration of class sessions, the topics that must be covered in particular courses, the level preparation of the students, the availability of labs, tutors, and peer mentors for the students, to name just a few. So although industry practitioners have considerable content knowledge, often far exceeding that of their faculty counterparts, they lack the local, pedagogical and pedagogical content knowledge required for success were they to teach alone in the classroom. This is one of the reasons why practicing professionals who moonlight as part-time teachers often do poorly, especially during their first several academic terms. Industry Fellows is distinguished from the “practitioner moonlighting as teacher” model in acknowledging the depth of expertise associated with teaching in particular domains. This difference is manifest by pairing the professional practitioner with the experienced teacher.
What this means when adopting Industry Fellows is that the teacher should do all of the “teacherly” things, such as writing syllabi and homeworks, and assigning grades. In addition, the teacher has the pedagogical expertise so as to determine how to best structure the classroom interaction so that the industry fellow can connect their workplace expertise to students. On the other hand, the industry fellow’s role is to enact their practice in the classroom using familiar materials. One of the main ways is in responding to student work using authentic representations of practice, as discussed below. Other successful activities that I have asked industry fellows to do include: talking through a case study from past work projects; presenting their own design portfolio used in obtaining their current position; showing examples of the kinds of documents and artifacts from their own work similar to what I am asking students to do in their assigned project work. By having the industry fellow enact their practice using familiar materials, it 1) exploits what the industry fellow does well, 2) saves the industry fellow considerable time since they do not need to do preparation to talk about what is drawn from their familiar, everyday setting, and 3) it keeps the industry fellow in their comfort zone, thereby reducing any anxiety that they might feel about not have expertise in teaching in higher education.
You have ultimate responsibility
Although Industry Fellows involves a collaboration between two people with complementary expertise, you are legally and ethically bound to take responsibility for what happens in the classroom, for the course material that is generated, for assigning grades, and for socializing the industry fellow so that their contributions are appropriate to the university setting. This also avoids any issues that you might face later about who is responsible, and who is in control. I further recommend that you institutionalize this division of responsibilities within your academic unit (see the UWT Institute of Technology Policy on Industry Fellows for an example of how this is done in my academic unit).
Plan the course together in advance.
One of the key things that distinguishes Industry Fellows from having one or more guest speakers is that an industry fellow understands the context of the course in which they are involved. Knowing the pedagogical goals that are the focus of a particular teaching activity as well as the history of student development to date enables the industry fellow to target their comments and feedback to students and the professor appropriately at any point during the term in which the course is running.
Understanding this context begins with planning prior to the start of the academic term. I like to do this in the summer before the academic year of the term in which the industry fellow will participate. This provides considerable time for feedback and reflection among the teaching pair. I prefer to meet face-to-face with the industry fellow, and at the end of planning will have three key questions that have been jointly discussed and answered: What will students be able to do on exit? What work will be assigned to students? and How will the topics from week to week be sequenced? In the past, I have structured these conversations in three separate meetings of 1-1/2 to 2 hours each. Here is how I structure each of these meetings.
Meeting 1: What will students be able to do on exit?
At the start of the first meeting, I elaborate on the Industry Fellows model, and discuss my reasons for teaching with an industry practitioner. I inquire into what the industry fellow is hoping to get out of the experience, in order to try to structure later interactions so as to satisfy these intentions. I provide a bit of context for the course: who the students are, where the course fits in the curriculum.
Then I talk about the course: its overall goals, and how it has been run in the past. I like to use a schedule that lists the topic and assignment ordering to mediate the conversation. Here is an example schedule from Interaction Design Winter 2009, that I used for this purpose. Making reference to this artifact that provides an encapsulated representation of the course as it unfolds over time keeps me grounded in the specifics of what I actually do, and provides a structure for discussing the different design decisions associated with planning a course. It is important to bear in mind that industry fellows may have no formal teaching experience, so they do not recognize all of the subtle and interlocking decisions that are required in order to plan a course. Talking together through these decisions not only helps the industry fellow understand the course and its context, but also illuminates the nature of teaching. In addition, it helps to elicit your own rationale for why you are teaching in the way that you do. This rationale is often tacit and taken for granted, so making it explicit helps to examine it in a new light and facilitates adaptive change.
Before leaving the first meeting, I make sure to spend time on the key question: what are the overall goals of the course? I like to come to agreement about this with the industry fellow, so that we have a shared vision from which to proceed. Here is what the industry fellow and I converged on for the Software Development and Quality Assurance course with an industry fellow in 2010: that students work in teams on a term-length software development project that enables them to practice requirements gathering, class design, coding, and testing, with an emphasis on class design. The extent to which the goals of the course can be determined by the participants or are a fixed constraint will vary from one circumstance to another. But even in cases where the course goals are taken as a fixed constraint, the general orientation and areas of focus and emphasis are generally open to scrutiny and discussion.
As soon as possible after the meeting, I type notes of the meeting, so that there is a record of the conversation and the decisions made. In addition, this is one of the places where I try to replay and represent the things that I learned from the industry fellow. These notes also provide me with the opportunity to see if there are gaps, open questions, or unresolved issues. This is what I wrote in my notes from the first meeting with my industry fellow (Jake) in winter 2010:
The key open questions. Note that these are all subject to not overburdening Jake, to being as lightweight as possible.
Finally, I add a sketch of next steps, primarily of tasks that I will need to take care of in the near term, and occasionally of responsibilities for the industry fellow. Here is what I wrote for next steps after the first meeting with my industry fellow (Beth) from winter 2010:
Josh sends to Beth:
Beth sends to Josh
Josh To do list:
Ask Vice Chancellor and Institute to appoint Beth Whitezel as visiting scholar.
After I have completed these notes, I then send them to the industry fellow for feedback and change. I find shared googledocs to be an excellent medium for capturing and disseminating these notes.
Meeting 2: What specific work will students be assigned?
The second meeting is centered around the work that you will assign students to do during the academic term. Asking “what will students do?” (cite Biggs) orients you to the ways in which you will scaffold student performance so as to achieve the overall goals that you specified during the first meeting. I like to use a large time line labeled week 1, week 2, ... through to the last week of the term, either on paper or a whiteboard, to mediate this discussion. Doing so helps me to visualize the interaction between the parts of the course, their sequential ordering, and the way in which they comprise a coherent whole.
I do not open every decision about student assignments to scrutiny and negotiation with the industry fellow. Rather, I focus on the key ones that I am willing to change that rely on the industry fellow’s expertise. For example, in the Interaction Design course from winter 2010, after we had determined that the main student work would involve a term-length design project, we spent our time mapping out how many “milestones” students would complete and hand-in, what students would do for each milestone, and how we would help students prepare for these milestones in the time between each due date. What we did not discuss were the other assignments that students would complete that I would simply reuse from the previous time that I offered the course: weekly group reports, individual evaluations of team members, weekly writings summaries of readings, and pre- and post-course surveys. I was quite satisfied that all of these assignments met their objectives, and did not believe that discussing them would be a good use of our time.
One other thing that I like to do during the second meeting is to have an in-depth discussion about the industry fellow’s commonplace activities. Many professional educators have not worked as a professional practitioner, or if they have it is several years in the past. This thus provides an opportunity for the educator to get a better sense of the world of practice. In addition, it provides a framework for understanding the industry fellow’s perspective, and a context for understanding the kinds of contributions that the industry fellow will be best suited to making relative to the course. In addition, it helps to correct any taken for granted misconceptions that an educator might have about professional practice.
I like to keep these conversations grounded in everyday practice, the workaday and quotidian, rather than in idealizations, generalizations, or philosophisizing. I use some of the following elicitation approaches, though I likely would not use all of these with any particular industry fellow.
I either tape record this, take considerable notes, or both. And I will sometimes draw diagrams, such as the lifecycle of a project. Here are notes that I took from such a discussion I had with my industry fellow in our 2nd meeting, summer 2009:
What does Jake do? "I'm a designer. But designers do a bunch of different things." Here is the classification scheme at Google. There are UX folk (about 200 people), made up of user researchers (or just "researchers" -- about 1/3 of the UX people) and designers (about 2/3 of the UX people) and web developers (less than 5% of the UX people). The user researchers do exploratory research early in the design cycle, which involves not just "how do they use current technology" but "what are their needs and goals". Researchers also do usability testing later in the design cycle. Researchers are looking for insights that can be turned into design opportunities. The web developers provide front ends and high-quality prototypes.
Within designers, there are visual designers (only a few) and interaction designers (the rest). In a phrase, interaction designers answer "how will it look, how will it work." The key things that an interaction design does are:
drawing sketches: handdrawn, often using the whiteboard (and photo'd), sketchy, used in the early stage, often by himself for ideation or with the PM. For doing initial exploration of the design space.
creating wireframes: these are usually hand drawn, often used in understanding the flow while not getting hung up in the details. It is sometimes used in a team setting so everyone has a "common view" at an abstract level. Not used very often.
building mockups: these "look like the real thing", and are fast ways to communicate with engineers. He might build these with Fireworks or Photoshop. They are high fidelity. Jake called them the "currency of design."
building prototypes: these will have enough "behavior" in them so that users can "click through" one or a few scenarios. They are often done in html or something similar. There may be lots of functionality that is not implemented. Jake will sometimes simulate a prototype using mockups and screencasts.
I asked Jake what things get usability tested. He stated that usability tests are used if "we think that the user feedback will matter for what we do." He said that some things simply never get usability tested - there just isn't the time, and you have too many sunk costs to do so. he said "a lot of the time you are relying on people's wisdom."
Jake does a lot of whiteboarding with engineers and product managers. When on project, he works on a team with one project manager (PM) and a bunch 'o engineers. Google is simply an engineering-centric company. "At Google, we build for power users." Which means that to some extent, they build for themselves.
As with the first meeting, I type up the notes of this meeting (adding them to the notes from the previous meeting), augmenting them with open questions and an updated plan of next steps, and send them to the industry fellow for comment.
Meeting 3: How will the topics from week to week be sequenced?
In this meeting, we discuss the week by week sequencing of topics, again using the timeline to mediate the conversation. Here is an example timeline that the industry fellow and I developed in our second meeting, summer of 2010. The first week is at the top and the last week is at the bottom. The timeline includes the project milestones (the larger rectangles that are centered) as well as the weekly topics (the smaller cards).
The discussion of topics provides a natural context for identifying specific places where the industry fellow can make brief demonstrations or presentations in class. I am always seeking opportunities for having the industry fellow talk about the week’s topic using specific examples drawn from their own work. I do not want them to lecture or “teach”. But, when appropriate and if they have time, I like them to talk about projects that they have worked on in the past, relating their discussing to the day’s theme. And it is particularly helpful (subject to issues of proprietary disclosure) if they can use authentic artifacts drawn from the project itself. This discussion the summer before they co-teach allows them to think about this issue far in advance. Here is a list that my industry fellow (Beth Whitezel) and I developed during the third meeting in summer 2010:
We talked about some of the topics that Beth might talk about. These could be impromptu, or lightly prepared, but drawn from her professional practice. They include:
As with the first two meetings, I document the meeting, add next steps, and feed this back to the industry fellow.
In sum, I let the overall course goals drive the course development. Having determined these overall goals, I determine the sequence of student work that will provide the scaffolding so that at the end of the term students will be able to achieve these goals. And finally, I sequence the readings and class session topics to provide knowledge and hands-on practice so that students will be able to carry out each homework assignment. I try to engage the industry fellow in a discussion of these important aspects of course design, and feed back to the fellow my notes that record our discussion and decisions. Here are meeting notes from the meetings with my industry fellow, Jake Knapp, from our meetings in the summer of 2010. The notes are in reverse chronological order (most recent at top), so they should be read from the bottom up. Note that between the meetings I was additionally adding additional commentary based on course-related thoughts that arose at random times. In addition, I took more time recording these notes than I might have otherwise, since Jake had mentioned that one of his goals was to learn more about how one goes about teaching a course in higher education. I thus wanted to try to make explicit some of the decisions and processes of course design that might otherwise have remained hidden.
As with any plans, it is important to recognize that these plans are always contingent on what occurs as the course progresses. They are thus subject to change, to updating in response to the feedback one obtains from actually running the course.
Use artifacts to mediate interaction
Blumenfeld et al (1991, pp370-1) define artifact in the sense in which I use it here: “We use the term artifacts to denote sharable and critiquable externalization of students’ cognitive work in classrooms ... [that] proceed through intermediate phases and are continuously subject to revision and improvement.” In the rest of this discussion, I will talk about representations and tools, and use these to mean kinds of artifacts. Research in the last two decades has thrown considerable light on the important role that artifacts play in thinking and social activity.
A commonsense view of mental activity is that thinking is purely an internal, in-the-head affair. As Andy Clark states "we are in the grip of a simple prejudice: the prejudice that whatever matters about MY mind must depend solely on what goes on inside my own biological skin-bag, inside the ancient fortress of skin and skill. “ He goes on to state “But this fortress was meant to be breached" (Clark, 2001). This “breaching” that he describes is the way in which people use and create artifacts--tools, language, representation--to get ideas out of their head and into the world.
Clark’s viewpoint is based on the work of Vygotsky and his successors (Vygotsky 1978, Luria 1976) beginning in the early parts of the 20th century. It builds as well on recent work that views the interaction between internal mental operations and their external representations out in the world as mutually constitutive (Cole 1996). A compelling example is provided by Clark (2001, p.19), who describes an empirical study on why artists need to sketch rather than simply recording their artwork that has been worked into final form wholly within the mind? He concludes that “[t]he sketch pad is not just a convenience for the artist, not simply a kind of external memory or durable medium for the storage of particular ideas. Instead, the iterated process of externalizing and re-perceiving is integral to the process of artistic cognition itself.” A useful metaphor he later develops is of thought “looping” through mind and world (Clark 2008).
What Clark suggests is that externalization of thought, through various types of human-constructed artifacts gives rise to new perceptual and cognitive operations that allow for reflection, critique, and iteration. That is, the act of bringing thoughts into material form, such as expressing software designs in words, symbols, and diagrams, is not merely a formal exercise, akin to taking mental dictation, but is itself constitutive of and essential to thinking and practical activity. Under this view, mind is not simply the sum total of representations and processes within the brain, but includes representations, tools and objects outside the brain as well. Sociocultural learning theorists talk about how such externalizations mediate thinking.
This mediation, however, is not purely between an individual and externalized tools and representations. Rather, artifacts are meaningful to mediate the interaction of individuals who share culture.. I use culture to denote not only the knowledge, practices, and artifacts of large social groups, but also smaller groups: “culture comes into being wherever people engage in joint activity over a period of time” (Cole 1995, p301).
Communities of practitioners develop particular external forms in which their practices are enacted and made visible to one another, and learning how to use and interact with cultural artifacts is an important part of becoming a participant in a community of practice. For example, a user interface takes a particular form (e.g. with icons, buttons, labels, links, menus) that students imitate and adapt when learning interface design (e.g. in a web development, hci, or interaction design course). This particular form is neither something “natural”, random, or invented by students. Rather, this form of interface represents the accumulation of decades of experimentation and negotiation among computer designers and users, sometimes explicitly in the usability lab and sometimes implicitly in the marketplace. When students construct such interfaces, they take part and become enculturated into the historical process of design that is an ongoing activity of their cultural group. Expert designers recognize and have expertise in designing this particular kind of artifact. These experts can therefore use both student- and expert-generated interfaces as objects of mutual reference around which to discuss, alter, experiment, and explore. These forms thus mediate interaction both intramental (within the head) and interpersonal (among the members of the social group who share a culture).
In Industry Fellows, I encourage you to have students use common artifacts appropriate to the domain practice. Taking software development as an example, this includes such things as requirements documents, user stories, use cases, scenarios, class designs, sequence diagrams, program code, and unit tests. Examples from my interaction design course of these mediating representations include sketches, personas, scenarios, mockups, videos, screencasts, and prototypes. These mediate the interaction between student, teacher, and industry fellow. I will often have students present such representations that they have developed, followed by commentary, critique, and discussion among all participants in the class. I have also asked students to post these representations on a webpage, and asked the industry fellow to make brief critique at their leisure, recording their comments using screencasting software such as Camtasia or Screenflow and playing them for students during class time. Here is an example screencast critique done by Jake Knapp. I have noticed that such representations enable industry fellows to enact their expert practice in the classrooms. Professional practitioners need no preparation in order to respond to student-generated externalized forms since such forms comprise the daily activity of the industry professional. And by making their practice visible in commenting and critiquing one student, other students are within the “horizon of observation” (Hutchins 1996), able to vicariously observe and learn at the same time. In a similar fashion, I have also asked industry fellows to demonstrate and discuss their own artifacts (or those of other experts) drawn from real work settings.
But there is a difference between mediated activity in the classroom and mediated activity in the workplace. The demands of the workplace generally require high levels of performance, less than optimal for the novice learning his or her craft. The classroom, on the other hand, provides learning opportunities unavailable in the workplace setting. This includes simulating professional practices thereby reducing the stakes and the risk, slowing down and interrupting activities to enable commentary and critique, and reconstruction and replay of student performance to allow cycles of reflection and practice. This is what Gee (2004) calls a supervised sandbox -- a place for exploration under the watchful eyes of those more experienced. With both the industry fellow and the teacher present, the classroom can provide the strengths of both the worlds of academics and the workplace. Using the mediating representations, the industry fellow can model and critique professional practice, while the teacher can narrate, alter the pattern of activity, and facilitate reflection. The representation and its associated activity thus stand at the boundary between the academic and the professional worlds of practice.
Ongoing interaction between the industry fellow, students, and you
One might imagine an alternative to the Industry Fellows model, where expert practitioners are brought in for a single session to provide feedback on student work. On the surface, this takes advantage of strengths of mediated interaction discussed above. This is, in fact, the norm in Schools of Architecture, where students present their work to experts in design critiques (often referred to as “crits”) (Anthony 1992). But one problem with crits is that they are usually summative (i.e. at the end) so that the expert feedback is too late to provide help to students on the current project. An even larger problem, however, and one that would arise for crits that might occur earlier in the project, is that external experts have little context for understanding what students need so as to further their learning at that moment in time. External experts see only a snapshot of student work, rather than the arc of a developmental trajectory. They thus have no sense about what students know, what options they have tried, what choices they have made in the past, and how their practice has evolved throughout the course. Nor do they usually understand the course goals and the means that have been used throughout the course to try to achieve these goals.
The Industry Fellows model thus differs significantly from these one-shot models due to the ongoing interaction between students and the industry fellow. Not only do industry fellows understand the course goals and methods, but they see how students develop as the course proceeds. As one industry fellow stated “On the last day, they gave presentations—I was really impressed. It felt good to think I had some role in what happened. I could see they were doing some of my suggestions and seeing some of the design thinking.”
Note that the classroom interaction between industry fellow and students can be short, and I have successfully used an average of only 15 minutes per week with one industry fellow, where we used Skype video as the main medium of interaction so that the fellow did not need to leave his office. I have also had successful instantiations where industry fellows attend in person a two-hour class session each week.
I make sure to spend approximately 15 minutes per week outside class in an in-person or telephone discussion of the current week of courses. In these conversations, we discuss the industry fellow’s and my interpretation of the fellow’s prior interaction in a class session and how we perceive its impact. I also discuss what has occurred in class when the industry fellow has not been part of the sessions. In addition, I discuss misunderstandings that I am seeing manifest in student work and comments. Here are my notes from this first telephone debriefing between myself and Jake, my industry fellow in winter 2010.
“Josh mentioned that the big issue from last week is that students are still figuring out what is going on. Most particularly, what will they be doing for their project. What is a "task" for which they will design? In what sense is a "how to" a designed artifact. During Thursday's class, Josh learned (among other things) that: the class sessions run from 10:20-12:25 (not 10 minutes later, like he thought -- Jeez!), that students have a different sense of "task" (some think it is a group task, some think that it is a designer task, some think that it is a user task). Josh also talked about creativity (which is characterized by novelty and appropriateness), and related this to the growing and shrinking, respectively, of the design pyramid that Jake drew for the project brainstorm. Josh emphasized that students should stay in the growing piece for the next few days, and had them share what they learned from listening to the focus group recordings with the librarians.”
Figure out how well things are going
One of my primary concerns in working with an industry fellow is to ensure that their workload associated with my course is sustainable for the duration of the academic term. My goal with each fellow is to accomodate their needs and constraints, and to respond to changes that they might experience in workplace and personal demands that impact their ability to interact in my course. In order to anticipate, prevent, and mitigate potential problems, there are two steps that I always take:
As to impact on students, I always give an end of term survey to students with both “check-box” type and open ended questions that tries to assess the impact of the industry fellow on the student learning. In addition, because the research indicates a strong correlation between intrinsic motivation and learning, I also assess how the participation of the industry fellow impacts student motivation to engage in the course activities. Here are the questions that I have asked in the past. For the future, I would likely adapt more of the questions from the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory developed by Deci and Ryan at the University of Rochester.
Summing up
Industry Fellows is a novel teaching model that pairs an industry professional with a college or university teacher to teach a course together. The industry professional contributes deep content knowledge and skilled practice, while the teacher contributes pedagogical, pedagogical content, and local knowledge. Working together exploits what each does best. The teacher maintains responsibility for preparing all course materials, for assigning grades, while structuring the classroom so as to facilitate interaction between the students and the industry fellow. Using authentic representations, tools, and artifacts from the domain within the classroom will provide the mediational means for coordinating this interaction, and will evoke the deep practice knowledge of the industry professional, making it visible to students. At the same time, the teacher can add an overlay of pedagogical practice to these mediated interactions, by slowing down, interrupting, and replaying them for the purposes of interpretation, to highlight subtle or easily missed points, and for reflection.
But simply pairing an industry fellow with a college teacher does not guarantee success. It is best to choose a course at the boundary of academia and industry, to choose an industry fellow that is intrinsically motivated to participate, and to negotiate the industry fellow’s time commitment up front. In addition, the teacher and the industry fellow should meet weeks or months in advance to plan the course together. This planning is structured around answering three key questions: what will students be able to do on exit, what will they be assigned to scaffold these practices, and what will be the sequence of topics and readings?
Industry Fellows is novel, but complementary to past efforts to encourage industry-academic cooperation such as guest speakers, practitioners moonlighting as teachers, and student internships. Guest speakers are one-shot, based on a model of learning as receiving transmitted content, providing no opportunity for the ongoing interaction that helps students to engage in professional practice. Practitioners who moonlight as teachers have the ongoing student interactions that are necessarily for enculturation into practice communities, yet do not usually have the pedagogical, pedagogical content, or local knowledge required for effective teaching. And student internships, while allowing students to engage in practice within the context of work, vary widely in their quality, provide little opportunity for students to reflect on lessons learned and integrate professional practices with their academic work, and do not provide the opportunity for other students to learn vicariously. Industry Fellows thus offers a new model for bringing professional practice into the classroom, allowing students to adopt and share authentic workplace practices while still in the academic setting.
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