Negotiating the non-negotiables
A Fortnight in The Life Of #9
We have spent the last few months redesigning our self-directed goal setting programme for anyone interested who is 10+ at our setting. Some of that redesign has come about due to my own reflections on the last almost two years of running a programme based on self managed learning (SML) and the limitations I have felt with it as a facilitator, some has been my reflections of recently starting to work with that programme with a higher percentage of young people who are quite early on in their deschooling journey and the challenges that that presents, however a large part of the impetus for these reflections is due to my unschooled masters module on planfulness. The other mentors have also added in their reflections, I have hosted structured conversations around planfulness with other UK based ALC facilitators, and finally there has been a lot of feedback from our young people driving the change too.
Over Easter we redesigned the programme to be more in line with our Agile Learning Centre (ALC) tools and moved away from the SML approach we had been using. We had tested a few things on the last day of term and had had positive feedback and so we went for a fairly large overhaul of the programme.
Last week was our development week where we build out people's goals for the term over two days and this Thursday was our first weekly review. It started with a scrum, an ALC tool where we stand up and quickly move through the things that we said that we were going to do this week, whether that happened and reflect on how it went. We do this whilst stood around a physical kanban board moving the post it notes from Doing to Done.
It was a disaster before it even started. Of the five of them three came in and instantly complained about having to stand up, about having to talk, and, it felt like at least, about having to even be there. This was not uncommon a few months ago; it was why there was a drive from everyone to change the programme. However, the gratitude that was there for the new system when trialing it a month ago was gone, replaced with a strong sense of irritation. They didn't want to do it, I persuaded them to try it and then give feedback if the worries they had did materialise and six minutes later we were done in what was possibly the most useless spending of six minutes in my life.
So we had, as always in self-directed education, a conversation; a meeting about meetings: a meta-meeting.
I wrote on the board CO-CREATION.
I laid out what I considered the non-negotiables, the bones around which the changes we had already made had been wrapped around and said let us either see what we can change with these in mind, or maybe you can try and negotiate the non-negotiables. They were:
We share what we did with everyone in a group
We listen so we can give feedback to all the people in our group
We do that to allow for reflection which leads to progression over time.
What is wrong with these? I asked.
Giving feedback is hard because I feel I have no reason to listen to people even though I know that is wrong.
I would prefer to not do this as a group and to just do this one on one with you in a short meeting. I don't need to know what other people are doing or need other people to know what I am doing.
This system is not funneling the information towards me in a way that I can work with.
I need something to work with that can grab my attention better.
Only one person gave one piece of feedback during the entire process we just did which I think shows that we don't care for feedback.
Ok. How could we do these differently I ask, think of anything that could be different about the way we do this. I started them off as I had an idea.
Instead of sharing with everyone we could share with partners. What would that do?
Yes, they said. It would make us need to focus. We would have to listen. And then we could give feedback. And it might be good feedback. It would be much more preferable.
Great. So what about non-negotiable 2: giving feedback. I might partner up with the same person for months and therefore giving them tailored feedback that is more detailed over time, but what if the things I really know about another person is exploring and could do with my feedback?
We could rotate through partners every week so we are always seeing someone else in the group. There are five of us so you could be someone's partner so that we all could work with someone.
This suggestion led me to the first flaw I could see. I broke 2 down into two parts. Peers giving feedback and me, as facilitator, giving feedback. How would I ensure I could give feedback to people if I was only partnered with one person that week?
If people were using Trello during the week then you could converse with them through that?
Trello is an online kanban. It is a new addition to the programme we have been using for the last week. We have it set up so that each young person has a board they share with me which includes a Review section between Doing and Done that I watch. That means that if someone is Doing a task and completes it they move it into Review. From there I get a notification and I can then attach a note to that task that asks them task specific reflection questions that they can then answer. Then when they have answered my questions they can move the task to Done.
Ok, I say. So most of the reflection can be done in the week. But if people don't engage with Trello maybe there could be a part of the meeting where I have a chance just to catch up with those people one to one. Essentially the more you use Trello to notify me of completed tasks and reflect during the week the less I will feel the need to catch you in the meeting and obviously the converse applies too.
Yes, ok deal.
Does three weeks seem a reasonable time period to trial this agreement?
Yes it does.
And with that the young people negotiated the non-negotiables away.