The results from the first midterm was quite disappointing for most of the people, myself included. Our professor gave us the chance to make changes for the next test and for the first test, but he required 100% support from all students. Thus, everyone has to agree to the new terms.
Not even a second had passed and ideas were thrown around across the classroom. Then Teddy stood up and asked if someone could write the ideas on the board since his handwriting was too bad. Gabriel volunteered right away. That was a great way to organize the ideas visually and calm the crowd down a bit. We only had 45 minutes to come to an agreement. Reaching an agreement is not an easy task for a large class of college students.
I wanted to suggest a curve for both exams, but soon I had an avoidance behavior. Many people in the class seemed to be so ambitious and some were also screaming. I thought things were already lively enough, so I decided to wait and see how things went. While observing some people, I discovered that some were fully convinced of their suggestions. At one point, one person gave up and wanted to leave the classroom instead of continuing to debate. Towards the end, in my opinion listing the ideas on the board was helpful. We could label the one we want and cross out the others. In the end, I had a compromised attitude towards the end result of the debating. In my opinion, it was not the best result, but still a very good one. Teddy and Gabriel helped us leading during the decision making process and after all everything went pretty smooth.
Another idea is to divide the class in small groups and each groups would come up with their package. After the groups had decided on their solution, everyone could vote on the ideas of the groups and the majority wins. I think this would have been a better solution because then the inefficiencies caused by a large group would be removed in the brainstorming phase. In the larger group, it is only the loudest voices which are heard. But in the smaller groups, more timid participants such as myself would be able to contribute more and thus more ideas, and perhaps better ones, would be considered.
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ReplyDeleteThis post in very similar to mine, I felt like I wanted to avoid adding fuel to a very non-productive fire and stayed relatively quiet.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with your solution, I also felt that getting into smaller groups would help ensure that would hear better ideas rather than just hearing louder voices.
And I agree that Teddy and Gabriel did a great job.
One thing that I felt happened that you did not mention was that when our classmate got up to leave it was, in my opinion, a turning point in that he showed us all how silly it was to continue arguing over small details that were getting us nowhere. After he sat back down, I felt like the tone of the discussion changed and we became much more productive.
I agree with you in that we could have made smaller groups to come up with the ideas and then vote on what is given out. It would have been less of a struggle and not that loud. But I also, found it interesting how at the end everyone just was in a rush to come up with the requests so we were sure we would have something than nothing.
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