When Conflict Helps Learning

We describe techniques, implemented in a junior software engineering course, for creating an environment of safety and for regulating the amount of conflict so that students can learn how to use conflict to benefit their learning and the project instead of being overwhelmed or discouraged by it. Inter-personal and intra-personal conflicts are inevitable in our lives and in the workforce, so learning to deal effectively with conflict is essential to becoming an effective engineer. One way to do this starts with realizing that conflict, such as perceptions of problems in other people, internal uncertainty, and dissonance between one’s desires and abilities, can be valuable. Conflict motivates learning because people do not like to repeat frustrating, embarrassing, or painful experiences. Conflict inspires innovation by illuminating areas of misunderstanding, invalid assumptions, personality or value differences that, when explored, can result in greater value to everyone involved. To maximize learning, it is important to balance conflict with safety. Too much or the wrong type of conflict can be detrimental to learning. The techniques we used, some of them borrowed from professional leadership training programs, had a deep and positive impact on the students, as revealed by their weekly reflective essays and by individual communication with them during and after the course. Students, perhaps subconsciously, created conflicts that enabled them to learn lessons they needed to learn. One aspect of safety is how to limit the damage of mistakes while encouraging learning from mistakes. To that end, we chose not to have a real-world customer whose dependence on the project success would have increased the damage from a potential project failure. Our focus was on the learning – in the true spirit of academia – in order to prepare students for successful engineering careers.