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by HarryHirsch
2198 days ago
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What do you do with people who cannot operate in an unstructured environment because their schooling has been completely authoritarian? It's a tough problem. You try to move away from worksheets and attendance taking because it's a university, students oftentimes have family or work responsibilities, so you hand out problems and administer exams, and it completely backfires. Up to now, everything was rigidly structured, now it's missing, and the kids are floundering. You read the instructor reviews, it's like the prisoners rating the prison guards. Apparently I'm not a good prison guard because I set problems instead of handing out worksheets. There are no easy solutions. |
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I think the way the one solves this with individuals is through behaviors akin to parenting and/or therapy. And in a team context, I do a lot with collaboration, feedback loops, retrospectives, and 1:1 discussions. But in a traditional classroom setting, I don't think those can be directly applied. A teacher just doesn't have time to give all their students that level of therapy, but the individual-evaluation model breaks most of the tools that make sense in a team context.
The only hope I see is a Montessori-like approach. Having seen kids go through that, they learn a level of collaboration and mutual aid that's missing in industrial-style education. With that kind of collaboration, I can see ways to apply the tricks we use with cross-functional software teams. Of course, Montessori students also learn goal-directed behaviors that suit unstructured environments, so maybe it's all of a piece.