A second challenge I encountered was negotiating the division of labor. Each partner had his or her own ideas about what is important for students to learn, and I struggled with how to balance their priorities against my own. In one case, my students learned a lot more about continuous integration and refactoring than they will likely need as web developers, because those topics were important to my partner. In another case, some students felt pressured into using a particular content management system to build their websites, and were unhappy with the results. I found it difficult to assert my own agenda when the partners were doing us such a huge favor in participating, and when they knew a lot more than I did in certain areas.
I also learned that students were much more attentive and engaged when partners shared their own experience than when they taught in a more formal sense. Even though their knowledge of the topic often surpassed my own, they lacked pedagogical expertise. One example: when our Agile partner gave an hour long PowerPoint lecture on test driven development, much of the talk was over the students’ heads.
But when the same partner talked about how he practices Agile in his day-to-day work, students paid attention and asked questions.