Sarah Jones' Diary

Week 4
Lots of Ho Ho value tonight – came very close to a punch up at times!

Did a bit of reviewing, chatted about impact of course on our teaching experiences and did a couple of quick exercises. But the guts of tonight’s session was this totally off the wall exercise we did so I’m just going to focus on that.

OK – here we go. Six of us had to volunteer to take part in the ‘game’ – the others were observers and had to sort out how they were going to organize that.

The six of us taking part sat around a square table. That was Dirk, Ludger, Lars, Magda, me and Graham. We were each given an envelope.

J gave out the instructions.

Inside the envelope were some pieces of differently shaped card. The objective of the exercise was that each person would end up with a complete 6” square in front of them.

The rules were that each person could silently offer one of their pieces to anyone else. That person could either accept or reject the offer. There was to be no other communication either verbal or non-verbal. So you couldn’t ask for a piece or beckon to attract someone’s attention or point or stare or anything.

Well it took for ever!

The first thing I noticed was that the shapes in the envelopes were all different and some people had lots and some only a couple. Seemed a bit unfair.

It took a few minutes of looking at what I had and playing around with the shapes but then I knew exactly what other bits I needed. I could see that two other people had these bits and so I just had to sit there and wait for them to offer them. It was really frustrating!

Some people just kept randomly playing with their own pieces and didn’t really seem to know what other pieces they needed and didn’t look up to see if anyone else had anything they could use either.

Really, everyone was so pre-occupied with working out what they wanted, no one (including me) actually started looking to see what pieces we could offer to anyone else for about five or ten minutes.

Then slowly, one by one, people started offering pieces to other people. Now I’m not going to mention any names (and I’m going to call everyone ‘he’ for anonymity but you could see if you could identify who’s who from the vid.), BUT one person just didn’t offer anyone anything – he just sat there and waited for people to give him pieces.

Then someone else was given loads of bits – like about 8 or 9 pieces because he just accepted everything then got completely overwhelmed because there were so many pieces in front of him.

Another person gave all their bits away trying to get everyone else to make a square then sat without anything in front of him for ages.

One person made their square quite quickly and sat there being a smug bastard with his arms folded (it was easy – only two bits and his next door neighbour had the bit he needed).

Lots of people started to break the rules and started pointing at the piece they wanted. I was really glaring at someone because they had pushed one of their pieces out of the way and forgotten about it and I REALLY wanted it!

I tried giving people pieces if I could see they had something I wanted hoping it would prompt them to give something back. Sometimes it worked, sometimes they just took it and didn’t offer anything back!

Even worse was someone I could see needed a piece that I had and I kept offering it but they kept rejecting it – time after time. That’s even more frustrating than someone not giving you something you need. People were beginning to grit their teeth and roll their eyes up at the stupidity of other people.

After about 15 or 20 mins loads of us were gesturing and pointing. Then we were told to obey the rules so there was quiet again. The tension really built up then.

Then after another 5 minutes most people had completed their squares but one person hadn’t. This made no sense because if the rest of us had completed squares in front of us, surely the last one was bound to work. For a while we were puzzled. Lots of people were frowning and some had lost interest.

Then it slowly dawned on a couple of us that the key was the smug person who had completed their square first. There were 2 solutions to his square. If he were to break his square up and give one piece to the person who hadn’t finished, and that person gave him a piece back, all would be well. But the problem was getting him to see that he had to sacrifice his square so that the whole group could succeed. Frustration finally overcame someone and in the end they just grabbed the piece from smug bastard and passed it over to Mr Confused.

So eventually, task completed – but having broken a lot of rules along the way. The relief when we finished was palpable – most people were positively exhausted! It was way past coffee time so J nodded that we could leave and we walked out. Strangely enough most people were quite quiet – my brain was racing trying to make sense of it all. Talked to Magda when we sat drinking our coffee and it slowly dawned on me that the cardboard shapes had been a metaphor for knowledge or learning or whatever you want to call it and we had been a learning environment in a microcosm. Powerful stuff.

After coffee J said she wasn’t going to debrief that exercise. Someone said they had always been told there was no point in doing an exercise if you didn’t do a debriefing. She said sometimes if the impact of the exercise was so obvious and so profound you could almost destroy that impact by having a debriefing session. Teaching as theatre she called it.

Instead we spent a few minutes talking about when you review or debrief or evaluate or whatever you want to call it. We had a stab at the pluses and minuses of doing an evaluation straight after an activity when it was still fresh in people’s minds or after a week or so when they had had chance to think about it. And, of course, when you don’t need to do it at all!

People quite subdued as we left.

Difficult to work out on my own if there were any VILP.

The thing that interested me the most was that we were given a group task (one square in front of each person) but it was perceived as individual task. The cult of individualism? So maybe the VILP is something about balancing collective vs individual learning? Dunno. Too tired to think