The first half of this morning was spent reflecting on some quotes. Marion and I picked quote 8: ‘whilst risk-taking is central to the critical thinking process, this behaviour is unlikely to occur unless those involved have no sense of fear’. This triggered an interesting conversation around assessment criteria and how this can inhibit risk-taking and critical thinking in students who focus too much on the grade: ‘how do I get an A?’. We discussed ways in which we have managed to mitigate this: namely focusing on process over outcome. This linked nicely with other conversations with the rest of the class around the lack of time we have to implement a sense of safety and support with students that may go towards overcoming the sense of fear (this lack of time often being institutional).

Some questions that arose:

How can we listen to what people are feeling in a way that drives learning? 

How do we avoid turning ‘process’ and ‘experimentation’ into another performative task that students do to tick a box rather than to really explore the projects they are developing?

After our conversation around the negative implications that a focus on attainment and assessment has, spending a couple hours at the end of the day dissecting what might get us an A on this course felt like a disappointment and a waste of time. I understand this may possibly be useful for undergrad students who have no previous experience with assessments, but in a room full of educators who deal with assessments multiple times a year, I felt like the time could have been better spent exploring and debating further the impact of assessments rather than getting us to think about how we could be high achieving students ourselves. 

The middle part of the day was spent discussing our teaching artefact. I found having this discussion with a colleague from a different course insightful in terms of seeing how the task could be considered from the perspective of a different discipline – in this case performance. We discussed the opportunities and risk of having a brief that was linked to competition culture. The sharing of the posters at the end was a nice moment and it was interesting to see the breadth of responses. However I found it difficult to truly engage in other people’s artefacts and posters because they were the result of such a personal process that was difficult to understand without explanation.