On streaking and underperformance
24 April 2017
I have had a short and light-hearted position paper published in Medical Teacher:
In this piece, Liz and I suggest that the shift to learner-centred modes requires learners to expose themselves (through reflections and self assessments etc) while we teachers remain buttoned-up, secure in our polished status. We ask our students to grapple with nuance and uncertainty, but often don’t show our own dilemmas, trepidations and hesitations. So, this blog post allows a little bit of intellectual streaking, the reveal of my internal thought (but not too much, perhaps you are not interested in the stuffed eggplants I’m planning to cook for dinner tomorrow*).
Moving onto the other topic at hand. Underperformance. I am fascinated by underperformance, those moments when we don’t meet expectations. There is no question, we’ve all underperformed at some points, and this failure can be equally productive or destructive. In my mind, assessment is key here: how do you know if you’ve underperformed unless there’s a judgement made about what you are doing. And there are distinctive limitations to your own judgement – there’s been a lot written about underperformance and self-assessment (so much so that there’s even an effect named after it – the Dunning-Kruger effect)**. Here at CRADLE we are very interested in assessment that promotes evaluative judgement – coming to recognise quality of work through self, peer and faculty assessment. How do we promote evaluative judgement through assessment when the students are underperforming? It definitely stings when you receive unexpected (and occasionally unkind) critique – and many of us, unhelpfully, provide this to ourselves. How do we progress from incapacity? How can you come to learn when you are deeply struggling with something that everyone else finds very easy? When does practice make perfect, and when does it simply make, well, more practice?
In my mind, this is why feedback and task design are so tightly bound as to be meaningless without each other. Iteration is key to improving based on feedback – as Liz and David Boud so cogently argue. On the other hand, human nature (and in fact teacher nature) is to tell the underperformer to do it better over and over again. (What myself, Liz, Rola Ajjawi and Jenny Keating have called ‘more more more’***.) With underperformance it may be that the iterative cycles look different. Sequencing, task selection, focusing on a particular facet of the task – these are all scaffolding tools of the teacher’s trade. But these can be difficult to devise for underperformance. And there’s still a lot of questions about what are the best strategies – particularly in clinical and other work-integrated learning settings where there’s a real tension between slowing down/iteration and getting the job down.
Now I’m at CRADLE, I find myself wondering about working with underperformance at scale. How do we scaffold tasks for underperformance to the breadth of a first year thousand-plus enrolment subject? Some argue that technology can help – and I do believe there is help to be had, but also there are no panaceas. Likewise, faculty development may be part of the puzzle – and learning designs. I often think, that as with any teacherly activity, we don’t think enough about what the students contribute.
That’s the end of my musings on underperformance. A bit of an intellectual streak, in part based a chapter I’ve been writing with Damian Castanelli (anaesthetist/CRADLE) and Charlotte Denniston (Monash) and a grant I’ve been devising with Rola, Friederika Kaider (Deakin) and Leoni Russell (RMIT). You can see, there are few references aside from work that I’ve been associated with and ones I really like (hah, the pleasure of the blog!). The end is, frankly, inconclusive: all questions and no answers. (It possibly underperforms).
So, I’m sure you have lots of thoughts and expertise on this topic and there is much more written than I can ever read. But that’s the virtue of the streak, you dear reader****, you can share in my dilemmas and inner thoughts.
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*or you may be. In which case see stuffed eggplant.
**Kevin Eva writes beautifully about this in the medical education literature. See Eva, Kevin W., and Glenn Regehr. ““I’ll never play professional football” and other fallacies of self‐assessment.” Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions 28, no. 1 (2008): 14-19.
*** Bearman, M., Molloy, E., Ajjawi, R., & Keating, J. (2013). ‘Is there a Plan B?’: clinical educators supporting underperforming students in practice settings. Teaching in Higher Education, 18(5), 531-544.
**** with which words I reveal myself to be aligned with the 19th century not the 21st
