After taking our first midterm, Professor Kurpis let the class decide what we wanted to do with the results and what format the second exam should be in. He gave us the entire class period to come up with one main decision as a class. This is a large class and fortunately for us, someone stepped up right away and decided to take charge. She went up to the front and asked us each to give our ideas until we came to a conclusion.
I personally used two methods to handle the potential of chaos during the class decision making exercise: compromise and collaborating. We used compromise because we were under pressure to make a decision, given the fact that we only had about an hour to come up with one decision that the entire class agreed on. Also, all members of the class were equal and had a fair voice in the decision, so that if one of us didn't agree with something, it wasn't an option. We also used collaborating because we had to bargain and negotiate amongst a large group and all all insights were considered. Another way to have handled this conflict would have been to split the class up into groups of 6, had each group come up with one decision, and then have the entire class vote on one decision. The reason I choose this method as an alternative is because I felt as though we had too many options up on the board, thus making picking one more complicated; so by minimizing the options by splitting the class up into groups, we might have created less chaos.
All in all, thank goodness we had a group leader otherwise the entire class would have started talking at once and we might have never came up with a decision!
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I agree that had we not been fortunate to have someone step up as a leader, we would have had chaos, and would have wasted valuable time. We probably could have worked more efficiently if we split into smaller groups, but somehow that didn't seem like an appealing choice at the moment. But looking back I think that by doing that we would have been able to thoroughly examine each choice.
ReplyDeleteI too used the compromising approach because I felt it was best to do what suited the class most as a whole. I also agree that we were veryyy lucky that we had a leader step up right away and take charge. Had Baily not done so, we could of potentially lost a great amount of valuable time just sitting there and not knowing what to do!
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