(for those benighted souls unfamiliar with Eurovision, the title’s from a song, so it’s fine. Really)
I ran into a bit of roadblock yesterday in class.
The students had been undertaking a negotiation on drawing up a joint statement by a number of groups and we were talking through some of the debriefing points.
I suggested that they’d taken things much as they came, whereas if they’d come with an agenda, or some text, had pushed to become chair or rapporteur, or generally had been more forceful, then they’d have been much more successful in securing what they wanted to achieve.
Ooh
This produced, well if not quite uproar then at least debate.
Various individuals argued that given the dynamic of the group, anyone who came in with A Plan would risk marginalising themselves for the rest of the module, as others would be resentful to them.
It was pointed out that they’d managed to produce a text, so why do things differently?
And they also highlighted that they had other modules to study for, so there was a limit to how much time they would or could put into preparing, not least because of the way I assess.
That assessment is based on self-reflective writing, so I’m not judging their ‘success’ in negotiating per se,
Ah
The discussion was a useful one, at least for me.
The root of it all largely appeared to come down to students taking my comments as a striving for perfection, rather than as a relativistic statement.
As we continued to talk, I tried to underline that I wasn’t asking that everyone did everything, but rather that doing a bit more than others would produce much of the same effect.
To take the example from the session, one student became the effective chair because they’d happened to say something at the outset of the session. It required no additional preparation, and because that individual also offered to write up the statement, they gained huge influence over the outcome.
Just a little bit
And this is perhaps the point for the rest of us.
There’s a tension in what we teach our students between the notional perfection of How Things Should Be and How To Do Better Than We Are Now.
That’s probably most pronounced in questions of methodology: how systematically and perfectly should one pursue a methodological approach and where can one cut corners (and to what cost)?
But it’s true of all our work. I’ve seen enough theory to know that there are almost endless levels of refinement of theoretical positions to know that perfection is never truly possible in a practical setting.
With that in mind, perhaps we have to ask ourselves how we tackle this tension in our classes. To counsel perfection is one thing, but do we not then set up students for some level of failure? But if we don’t strive to do the best we can, do we risk not helping students to maximise their potential and their practice?
The answers to these questions will vary from place to place, but a starting point has to be an understanding of what we aim to achieve with our students.
In my case, I’m going into the coming sessions with some new ideas to help draw students more into the kind of logic that I discussed with them, to see if that addresses the dilemma.
And if it does, then we’ll move onto the next line of the song: “A little bit more”.