by Lynn Barendsen
At our annual Project Zero Summer Institute, we taught a new course called Quality: Does it Matter? For the past five years, with generous funding from Faber Castell, a company that shares our own GoodWork values, we have been studying the topic of quality—how people define and understand quality, how they make decisions and judgments about quality, and how perceptions of quality change over time, due to life changes as well as societal changes, including the influx of new technologies. We have wondered how quality relates to GoodWork (certainly we hope that individuals strive to do excellent, high quality work) and how aiming for quality in work and other realms helps individuals to lead and live a “quality life.” This study of quality is one of many related topics of research: in addition to good work, our team has been investigating good play, good citizenship, and the elements necessary to a good life.
After completing an in-depth study of individuals in the United States, we also surveyed 5000 other individuals around the world, including Brazil, China, Germany, India, and Indonesia. We are about to launch the survey in Turkey. We decided to teach a “minicourse” at this summer’s Institute because we believe that many of our findings are relevant to teaching and learning in the 21st century.
The goals of the course were for participants to explore their own definitions of “quality” and to unpack what this term really means to them personally and professionally. Interestingly, throughout the course, we validated many of the findings from individuals all around the world—quality is most important in terms of time, and decisions about how to use time wisely (rather than to waste it, or just let it pass) is paramount. Spending time with family and friends—being around those who you care about—is much more important than spending time on the computer or running errands. With this in mind, we asked participants about how we can ensure that students experience “quality” learning and teaching in school, and asked them as well to think further about how they define “quality” learning and teaching.
As part of our course, participants worked with a book we have written (currently unpublished) called Quality Through the Ages. The book is a compilation of 45 examples of quality over time—spanning some of the earliest inventions (e.g. clay and painting) to modern day monuments, professions, and other examples and spheres of quality (e.g. Shakespeare, tracking of time, the Internet). All of the participants read a short essay discussing the Olympics. We chose this essay because we thought that it brought up interesting issues for teachers and because it was timely. Please click here to read this example (link).
Indeed, the essay about the Olympics raised many important issues for teachers, even more than we had anticipated (no doubt the fact that the 2012 Olympics had just begun in London had a priming effect!). As we moved from table to table, we heard many important points including:
– How is quality really judged? How do we judge the level of quality work in the classroom? Do students feel that we judge work in objective ways, or is the process necessarily more subjective?
– How far can we (or should we) push students to produce high quality work? Just as some athletes are pushed too far, should we be expecting perfection from our students?
– Some Olympian athletes are motivated to win and compete for intrinsic reasons (e.g. personal satisfaction) rather than some “professional” athletes who like to compete and win for money. How does this apply to students? How can we encourage kids to work hard for intrinsic reasons (rather than extrinsic purposes, e.g. winning awards, getting high scores and GPAs)?
-How do we know when our standards of quality are unrealistic? Is quality dependent upon the values we bring to the table?
-Time (a constant theme in our research) can determine who wins (e.g. who is the fastest runner) or who is the most prepared (who has put in the most time in training). In the classroom, knowing how to judge time is a crucial skill students need to learn. When is a paper “done”? When is it time to move on to the next assignment?
In addition to the discussion of this vignette, a few other interesting “findings” emerged from the course. Specifically, participants seemed guarded about discussing traits or markers of a “quality student.” This came up at the end of the course, when we asked participants to roam the room and write thoughts about a variety of categories, including “quality student,” “quality teaching,” and “relationship of quality and balance.” Some teachers were offended by having to describe or define a quality student, yet they did not have the same reaction to being asked to describe quality teaching. Were teachers being defensive about their students? Their craft? Or, if we had asked about a “quality teacher,” would we have had the same reaction? Furthermore, the relationship of quality and balance proved a very useful concept for teachers. Balance related to many aspects of the course—how to strive for quality work and at the same time keep balance in our personal lives, how to balance the double-edged sword of technology use (it helps people be more efficient, but is also labeled as a waste of time), and how to encourage deep passion and “flow” in work, but not lose sight of the ultimate goal.
In sum, we were pleased that the topics and our research findings resonated with participants. Quality is very much at the center of GoodWork, and indeed, many of the sentiments shared throughout the course could have been articulated at the Toolkit minicourse that we’ve offered for several years. As a result of this course, we have begun to think about ways to adapt Quality Through the Ages into a Quality Toolkit or to infuse it into our current GoodWork Toolkit…so stay tuned!