Having students take responsibility for the process of learning

Having Students Take Responsibility for the Process of Learning Andrea K. Schneider Julie Macfarlane There is often an inconsistency in conflict resolution teaching between what we are trying to impart—that process matters deeply and that we should be proactive about enabling effective and appropriate process— and how class is often conducted. This short article offers some reflections on the sources of that inconsistency, and some suggestions for corrective action. T he first thing to understand is how a typical mediation or negotiation class is conducted in a law school. Most conflict resolution teachers understand the importance of experiential learning in learning about the process of negotiation or mediation, and so they structure a class that is a mix of role-plays, discussions, lectures, and other exercises.1 Without a doubt, many professors recognize that students must experience the process of negotiation or mediation in order to understand it and improve their skills. The substance of what we teach in class encourages students to be proactive in the roles they will play in dispute resolution processes—for example, to take the initiative in setting the tone of the interaction, plan for an agenda, and negotiate control over process as well as substantive outcomes. The inconsistency that concerns us and that has given rise to this article appears in the pedagogic planning and delivery of courses on mediation and negotiation. If substantively we are teaching our students that they should be aware, and take responsibility for, choices over process, then how class processes are conducted should reflect, and ideally model, this philosophical commitment. CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTERLY, vol. 20, no. 4, Summer 2003 © Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 455 456 SCHNEIDER, MACFARLANE We all know that when students can actually translate our conflict resolution lessons into the real world during the class—in negotiations with family and friends, or in a mediation clinic with live clients—the learning is deeper and more meaningful.2 One aspect of this is an explicit recognition that the classroom furnishes the location for, and class process offers the substance of, a multiparty negotiation. Therefore the remainder of this article describes a number of practical strategies to encourage students to take more responsibility for the process of their learning. This means some new learning for teachers as well as students, because we are accustomed to taking responsibility for and controlling the learning process. Process Control and Academic Legitimacy As a university teacher, one is inevitably subject to the subtle but pervasive influence of the institutional traditions of teaching and learning, traditions in which the authority and the legitimacy of the teacher rest on clear lines of hierarchy. Professorial power seems inherent in university culture, rather than something one chooses to use or not use. Where does this assumption of power come from? Both historically and in contemporary times, the rationale of the university as an institution has rested largely on its asserted status as the domain of the expert.3 As a result, the university tradition still largely promotes what Freire described as the “banking method” whereby the “teacher’s task is . . . to ‘fill’ the students by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge.”4 In this way, the university ideal is perpetuated by what Tyrell Burgess calls “the myth of the given,”5 where what is “given” is imparted by experts whose authority goes unquestioned. The traditional conception of the teacher-student relationship, then, is one in which the professor, and not the students, is solely responsible for determining what should be learned and how. The inherent contradiction between the traditional model of teacheras-expert and the genuine promotion of responsibility taking by our students helps to clarify why we may have a blind spot about the potency of the classroom as a microcosm of process responsibility. This assumed responsibility taking by the teacher takes many implicit and explicit forms—for example, by choosing to present material on one topic and not another, by devoting more class time to discussion of one topic than another, by calling on particular students (obliging their contribution Having Students Take Responsibility for the Process of Learning 457 rather than expecting them to take responsibility for it) and not others, and by setting out universal and unnegotiated assessment mechanisms and criteria.6 Asking Our Students to Take Responsibility for Process What are some classroom strategies that might lessen our grip on the process and encourage students to self-consciously develop learning goals along with us? The place to start is even before the class has begun. Many professors use a course memorandum to outline requirements. The course memo can discuss attendance requirements given the number of role-plays, the amount of time required for role-plays out of class, reading assignments, and written assignments (including journals). This type of memo can serve at least two goals. First, it serves to put students on notice as to the work and time commitments required for the class. If they are not committed, they can drop before the semester has begun and other students can take their place. Second, and more important for the purposes discussed here, the memo can serve as a quasi-contract between the professor and her students. The next stage is the first class of the semester. Most professors begin their classes with an explanation of the syllabus and a review of the course requirements. This too should be done in a conflict resolution class, and perhaps it merits special attention in this context. Much like the opening statement in the mediation, professors can have an opening statement about the process of the class. This would parallel the practice of beginning mediation by asking for the parties to consent to the process and the role of the mediator. The professor can conduct an “opening statement,” outlining the class, discussing the role of the professor, and above all the responsibilities of student participants. Finally, as in mediation, the professors can ask for students to agree and commit to these process principles.7 Professors can construct the consent to the learning process and the acceptance of responsibility in a number of ways. A simple assent is the most passive method to have students buy in. A more explicit admonition—drop this class if this is not what you want—is slightly more active. An even more proactive approach is to require students to discuss their responsibilities for the class themselves. One of our colleagues asks each student, “What do you want to say about your participation in this class at the end of the class?” This process is effective in two ways. First, it gets students to truly think about their participation rather than adopt the more passive approach to 458 SCHNEIDER, MACFARLANE acceptance described here. Second, it usually encourages students to think idealistically and optimistically. The process is likely to result in more committed students. Professors can also ask an additional question: “What would spoil this class for you or frustrate you achieving your goals?” The question further helps setting expectations of responsibility for the class. This is parallel to the setting of groundrules in a mediation. For example, one student answered, “If other people weren’t prepared.”8 This expectation, shared with the class, creates a wonderful culture of shared responsibility. The conversation over participation also builds consensus among the students and offers another real-life model for multiparty negotiations. Students might also be asked to write a more formal response to the memo on course requirements, separately or as a journal assignment. As well as describing their particular commitment to participation, such a memo could also include a statement of their personal goals for the course. The beauty of a participation commitment, in addition to the joy of truly involved students, is that this process mirrors the process they themselves will use as mediators. In fact, the question—(“What do you want to say about your participation at the end of the process?”)—came first from a practicing mediator. Mediators who wish to develop and excel must also set their own goals, both for individual cases and for their own long-term growth into this role. Of course, setting participation and other personal goals is going to be meaningful only if they are then integrated into class discussion throughout the course. At any time in the semester—particularly midway through the semester or at the end of any class—the professor can ask her students: “What have you done to contribute to this class? How have you helped or added to your learning and to others’ learning? How have you taken further steps toward achieving your personal goals in this class? What else do you need to know and understand better in order to get further toward these goals?” We all know as professors that the best classes are when each student participates fully—by preparing for role-plays, by being open and candid in debriefing, by providing helpful feedback to their peers. This approach achieves multiple goals for us as teachers. First, to the extent that students need a midcourse correction, questions of this type and focused discussions can serve as a wake-up call to examine how much is being learned and what still needs to be done in order to make this course a really productive and satisfying experience for everyone. At the midsemester point, both students and professor can often use some reinvigoration. Having Students Take Responsibility for the Process of Learning 459 Second, initiating discussions about the process of learning is another opportunity for the teacher to model the behaviors we are teaching to novice mediators and negotiators. For example, a mediator may use original process commitments to get participants back on track (“We all agreed to no interrupting”). We also train negotiators to take a step back and do a process check—(“How is the negotiation going? What can you do to improve it?”) A professor can conduct the same type of process check with the students in her class. Third, asking students to reflect on their participation in the class builds exactly the type of self-awareness needed to be truly effective in conflict resolution. We already use a multitude of pedagogic tools to build this awareness. We assign reading about self-awareness; debrief role-plays; create opportunities for peer, self, and teacher feedback; have videotape to review; assign journal entries in which we ask students to reflect on their role-plays; and use personality or conflict resolution–style tools. Yet the majority of these tools focus on role-plays, not real-life experiences. As we all know, some students are better at “getting into” role than others. For some students, real self-awareness comes only when we build it using real events. In fact, feminist learning theory suggests that real learning—which reflects innate flexibility, responsiveness to context, and tolerance—is only possible via real-life personal experiences, or at least an ability to relate the lessons of role-plays and exercises to real-life experiences.9 Questions and exercises that review student participation in class are one very real way of building awareness. Related to developing self-awareness is the subset of awareness of one’s learning style, tendencies and preferences, strengths and weaknesses. Encouraging students to take more responsibility for their own learning processes also enables “double loop” or “reiterative” learning. The inference here is that to learn from our experiences we should be able to loop back and reexamine the processes involved in any one task, as well as the assumptions embedded in those processes (including problem analysis, research, and issue identification). Double-loop learning encourages constant critical reflection on process and challenges our students to regularly rethink the basis of their actions and decisions. These ideas have been very influential in medical education, where in some schools students learn almost entirely using problem-based learning exercises (complex simulations of practice) rather than didactic (“given”) lectures.10 An emphasis on building self-awareness via reflective learning is probably more familiar to legal educators through the work of Donald Schön.11 460 SCHNEIDER, MACFARLANE Assessment: The Final Frontier of Teacher Power? A final question we considered in developing our thinking for this article was whether the ultimate power of assessment—currently solidly entrenched in the hands of the professor—could be negotiated or mediated between ourselves and our students. There are clear and well-supported pedagogic arguments for handing over some of this responsibility to students. A basic element of taking responsibility for present as well as future learning (sometimes described as learning for “capability”12) is the ability to monitor and appraise one’s own work. A new emphasis on self-appraisal challenges the assumption of professorled assessment processes. The self-conscious independence of the capability approach is in sharp contrast with the “dependence model”13 with which we are more familiar in legal education, where the professor takes responsibility for students evaluating learning against a statement of desired outcomes (generated by the professor or by her colleagues). If possible, students should have an opportunity to shape the form of the assessment process by setting personal objectives and criteria for their attainment. Making a serious personal assessment of how well she has achieved these initial goals is potentially a tremendous learning experience for a student, and it signals the value placed by the professor on ongoing and self-critical learning rather than limiting assessment to summative testing. Another important way in which students can take some responsibility for assessment is to offer them a choice of assessment formats, and allow them to select the approach (for example, journal, research paper, performance assessment) that best matches their personal goals. Students could be given the responsibility of commenting on one another’s work. Many of us have experimented with peer critique and assessment and find that this is another skill that students can and perhaps should learn for future capability. Peer assessment could also be incorporated into a teamwork structure, where at least part of the assessment is about how effectively the individual works in cooperation with others. As a direct challenge to the highly individualistic and competitive culture of law school, teamwork offers an environment in which taking responsibility for process becomes a necessity rather than an option for each team member, especially if the group is encouraged to analyze its own successes and weaknesses in accomplishing the set task. Finally, it is worth noting that one of the ways in which professorial power over assessment is sustained is by heavy reliance on summative or final testing devices for student appraisal. This approach overlooks the potential of assessment to be a learning experience in itself (something our Having Students Take Responsibility for the Process of Learning 461 students rarely consider, perhaps because their professors do not, either!). In reality, assessment can never be the finite sum of learning or the end of learning, since subsequent experiences inevitably lead to new learning. The more opportunities students have to practice the various dimensions of their assessed tasks, the more negotiation and clarification is possible over standards and expectations. By rejecting the popular convention of assessment by “ambush” (where students feel unprepared for assessment and its form comes as a nasty surprise), professors inevitably share some of their power with their students.14 Sharing Responsibility for Process: An Integrative or a Distributive Dilemma? In closing this article, we wish to pose two questions that appear to us to be vital to substantiating, in practice, our realization that conflict resolution teaching can and should challenge students to take more responsibility for classroom process. The first is whether the power exercised over classroom process by professors, consciously or otherwise, is really available for negotiation at all. Some would argue that handing students pieces of the action—for example, setting their own goals and assessment criteria, or asking them to commit to a learning “contract”—is essentially manipulative because it obscures the continuing reality of professorial power. Even if we ask students to self-assess, or carry out peer assessments, how far will we factor them into their final grades? Is our vision of the syllabus already so well developed that we really cannot make space for student suggestions for amendments? Don’t we know better than they do, anyway? Our second question may offer the beginning of an answer to this quandary. Is classroom power—control over the teaching and learning process—a zero-sum equation? Does devolving more responsibility to students mean less power for the professor (which some might translate into classroom anarchy and lack of proper learning structure)? Or is there a way in which we can expand our understanding of the elements of process responsibility—acknowledging that personal meaning and connection with the learning process allows the very best and more enduring learning—to permit some integrative sharing between the professor and her students? Notes 1. See the Website for the Program of Negotiation (www.law.harvard.edu/ Programs/PON) for typical syllabi and also articles noting the importance of this mix. 462 SCHNEIDER, MACFARLANE 2. See, for example, Kolb, D. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1984; and for a feminist analysis of adult learning in legal education, Macfarlane, J. “A Feminist Perspective on Experience-Based Learning and Curriculum Change.” Ottawa Law Review, 1995, 26, 357. 3. The traditional definition of the university ideal, that universities should pursue knowledge (as “truth”) for its own sake and not for any reasons of “utility,” originated in the work of Newman in the last century. See Newman, J. H. The Idea of a University. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. (First published 1852) 4. Freire, P. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1993, p. 57. (First published 1970) 5. Burgess, T. Education After School. New York: Penguin, 1977. 6. See also Macfarlane, J. “Teacher Power in the Law School Classroom.” Dalhousie Law Journal, 1996, 19, p. 71, from which some of the text is derived. 7. The idea was suggested to us by Maude Pevere of Stanford, who credits mediator Dana Curtis, also an adjunct at Stanford, with first using this in class. 8. Courtesy of Maude Pevere. 9. See, for example, Code, L. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. 10. See, for example, Barrows, H. S., and Tamblyn, R. M. Problem-Based Learning: An Approach to Medical Education. New York: Springer, 1989; and in legal education, Macfarlane, J., and Manwaring, J. “Using Problem-Based Learning to Teach First Year Contracts.” Journal of Professional Legal Education, 1998, 16, 271. 11. See three works by Schön, D. The Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: JosseyBass, 1983; Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987; and an address to an audience of law teachers, “Educating the Reflective Legal Practitioner.” Clinical Law Review, 1995, 2, p. 231. 12. In management education, see Hamblin, A. “Accreditation, Validation, Evaluation and Assessment in Management Education.” In S. Goodland (ed.), Education for the Professions, 20th annual conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education, 1984. London: SHRE and Nfer Nelson, 1984. 13. Maughan, M. “A Capability Approach to Assessing Skills on the LPC: A Strategy for Developing Future Effective Performance.” In J. Webb and C. Maughan (eds.), Teaching Lawyers’ Skills. Sydney, Australia: Butterworths, 1996. 14. For further discussion of challenging traditional assessment pedagogies in legal education, see Macfarlane, J. “Assessing the Reflective Practitioner: Pedagogic Principles and Certification Needs.” International Journal of the Legal Profession, 1998, 5 (1), 63. Andrea K. Schneider is a professor in Marquette University’s School of Law. Julie Macfarlane is an associate professor on the faculty of law at the University of Windsor.