This week I have been reminded how much power a good workshop holds for learners. It’s that time of year where student minds start to focus on upcoming assessments, and whilst I’d love that energy and drive to present itself earlier in the year, I am at peace with this sudden rush towards the finish line.
Workshops provide a blank canvas, and whilst it is up to the students to bring the paint and brushes, it is my role is to help them craft the forms and colours they choose to create.
This can take many shapes. This week my television studio teams have been testing their concepts and scripts, creating everything from creepy purgatorial dinner tables in the afterlife, to spaceships landing on distant planets, and haunted mansions holding secrets. When every team member is working to both their individual goal and that of the group, a strange and palpable energy spreads through the studio. As one of my first years put it, the moment of ‘lock in’. It is an energy that naturally forces phones into pockets, eyes on the prize, and hands onto the tools of their trade, be they camera controls, scripts, or the pretty buttons on the vision mixing desk. That energy can leave a class buzzing and slightly dazed at the progress they’ve made, the sort that they never thought possible.
However, getting to that blissful point is fraught with difficulty. The challenge is how to provide that focus on the goal more consistently throughout the semester, allow for creative experimentation and failure, without the persistent background hum of assessment. Multiple mini-deadlines might seem like the answer to providing said motivation, but that can simply break up deadline stress and sprinkle it throughout the year, ensuring a constant low-level pressure. Lessening the impact of that final assessment can also make that sparky ‘good energy’ fizzle. But nor should we pile everything onto that final moment either, regardless of how similar to ‘real world’ practice that might be.
It is a fine line to tread between the practices of industry and education. I am very open with my students about this. For the most part, we can provide that recreation effectively and accurately, but there are a few things that simply cannot be emulated in the education sector as they are in industry. Teamwork is a key one. As much as they may want to, students cannot fire each other, nor should they be able to! Not only are they not precis to their peers’ individual circumstances in the same way an employer would be, they also can’t be expected to have the sort of process in place that might be used in industry to support and manage those not meeting their objectives. And whilst we as educators can provide that help to those that are struggling, the experience of those students who are fully engaged doesn’t need to suffer either, and can be turned into a positive.
I have had many conversations with my students when they find themselves in groups where engagement is mixed, about how to strategise their projects. Having to step up further to fulfil a gap in a team and for the good of the project is frustrating, but that short term intensity can have longer term benefits, both in terms of assessment evidence and material for future job interviews (providing it doesn’t become an unreasonable and sustained additional burden). Additionally, the scope and nature of the project itself can be flexed to meet the capacity of the group. However, this is where it is fundamental to assess everyone in a group individually. Blanket marks only succeed in throwing said blanket over the problems as well as the triumphs, and that is not fair to those that worked for the triumphs. Yes, it is more laborious to assess, but it is right and proper and fair, which in itself should be enough of a driver.
Equally, it is vital that group work has the ability to provide an encouraging and stimulating home to the many different types of learners we have, be they vocal, animated, quiet, studious, or any of the infinite combinations that make up our cohorts. I am fortunate that television production can provide such a home, from the gentle art of writing a script or creating set, to the people-centric nature of being a floor manager or director.
I talk to my students about footprints a great deal, often of the carbon variety, but in this context, their individual creative footprint on the project. Individual assessment within group work is the only way to recognise that difference. Those that tiptoe lightly around it and barely ruffle the edges, alongside those that wade in, shape the earth and make big, bold impressions, metaphorically, if not physically.
So whilst the moment of ‘lock in’ might often be elusive, I think there is a lot we can do to sew a fertile ground for it, and fundamentally, that lies in an individual approach to group assessment.