In my previous blog, I identified two Tacit Assumption Traps (TATs) that we fall into as facilitators, particularly for team-based, collaborative projects, which I promised we would come back to:
- That the soft skills have been positioned by facilitators, at the time they were being taught and examined, as an important precursor to managing an effective project team for the end-of-qualification capstone project. In other words, there was a specific personal reason for each of them for doing the learning in the first place.
- That, if that positioning happened, learners actually took it seriously, kept all the resources that went with it, and that they will go back to those resources when they need some refreshing to deal with current and future problems.
The reason I didn’t talk about them in the previous blog is because I wanted to direct the focus on self-care for the facilitator. My thinking behind that was simple: If we can’t care effectively for ourselves, we aren’t going to be all that good at helping learners care for themselves, or for each other.
The TATs I’m talking about here tend to come about as a matter of convenience on our part as facilitators. They certainly have on mine, more often than not. It’s often difficult to find the time to check in meaningfully with every learner about what they already know, think and practice when it comes to self-care. There are so many things we need to get through when we’re facilitating a course and we have a fixed amount of time in which to do them all. Add to that self-care not being included in the Learning Outcomes for most courses – except by possible implication – and it’s understandable why it doesn’t get the attention it could.
You might argue that, if self-care isn’t one of the specified Learning Outcomes for a course, there is no obligation on us to teach it. I might agree with you that’s true – if we are being guided only by the letter of the words in the Course Descriptor or the Graduate Profile. I would argue that we need to go beyond that and engage with the spirit of who we are trying to develop the learners to be, both professionally and personally.
It’s a useful assumption that self-care is something which may have been covered in other courses leading up to – even if not explicitly – and that learners have some knowledge of appropriate self-care from general life experience. Some of these things may be true – depending on how those precursor courses have been delivered (never mind what the official course documentation says on the matter), as well as what experiences learners have brought to their formal learning from life outside the classroom. Add to that an expectation – again convenient – that the learners have understood and appreciated their self-care knowledge and what to do with it before we put them into a significant collaborative working situation, with maybe some collaborative assessment thrown in, and it’s no wonder some of them don’t cope as well as we might expect them to.
The reality is they don’t all have the same base levels of knowledge and experience. They may not all have been exposed to the relevant knowledge or had the appropriate experiences in similar ways as part of previous courses.
This means we really have an obligation to share the knowledge and skills they will need as part of their collaborative projects when they get to us. It also means we need to coach them and support them in effectively using these; not assuming that this part of our role is over simply when the information has been transmitted from our side. What knowledge and skills should we be sharing and coaching to help enable learners to self-care?
The ones I’m listing here are just as relevant when it comes to caring for others as they are for caring for self. This is important because self-care isn’t something that’s a totally solitary thing. The way we treat others, and the way they treat us in return, are critical determinants of how we are likely to treat ourselves. As we work though this list, I want you to think about what each of these points means for you in practice:
- Attitude – being willing to stretch where people think their comfort zone is; and being willing to treat mistakes or events that weren’t originally anticipated as Learning Moments rather than Punishment Opportunities. Recognising that everybody isn’t going to display their attitude in the same way. Recognising that attitudes are influenced not only by things happening inside the project team, but also in the world away from work, and trying not to jump to conclusions about why attitudes are displayed the way they are.
- Leadership/followership – being able to make tough decisions and guiding followers to implement them successfully. Being able to support the leader and fellow followers to achieve shared aims. Understanding that playing different roles isn’t about superiority/inferiority – it’s all about people doing the things they are best at doing towards the shared aims, learning new knowledge and developing new skills in a supportive environment rather than having a negative attitude towards somebody else just because of their role, or while they are learning new things. Giving constructive feedback to others in the team, while receiving and acting appropriately on feedback from others. Helping others when it’s needed, because it’s the right thing to do in pursuit of those shared aims, rather than because somebody has to order it to happen.
- Working together – I’m often reminded of the old acronym “TEAM”: Together Everyone Achieves More. When the overall result of a project is shared, every contribution is important, no matter who is responsible for it or how big it is compared to any of the others. This means making sure that all the work is appropriately sequenced, so nobody is unnecessarily left waiting for somebody else to finish their bit first. It also means, as I’ve mentioned in the previous point, that members help one another – there’s no holding back if somebody asks for help, and knowledge/experience-sharing is the norm.
- Separating facts from opinions – it’s sometimes said that one person’s fact is another person’s opinion. It would be surprising if everybody on a team agreed about everything that was discussed or done, but problem-solving and decision making will be more effective if members are able to tell the difference between objective (provable) facts and subjective opinions that haven’t become objective facts yet. Vigorous discussion isn’t something that should be avoided – conflict can actually be a good thing, as long as it’s constructive, because that’s what surfaces ideas that probably wouldn’t be talked about otherwise.
- Thinking before voicing things out – but allow for members who think most effectively by voicing things out. Not everybody is at their most comfortable with pen and paper, software or manipulating things. It’s important to capture ideas, or reactions to what members have done or said while they are fresh, and people don’t need the fear of being shut down or disrespected just because they voice out. It’s OK to challenge ideas – in fact, that’s what you should be doing in a team. but that’s not the same as “having a go” at the person.
- Inclusive rather than exclusive language – words that might have no negative connotations for one person might be perceived in a very negative way by somebody else. That means being aware not just of the words chosen, but also the context in which they are being used and the tone given to them.
I love to share these sorts of knowledge and experiences through practical exercises where learners have real experiences when they get to put teams together to manage a small project with ambiguous (and shifting) parameters. Nobody `loses` at the task, because there are no `wrong` solutions – instead, there are many possible solutions that could achieve the desired outcomes. The real `winning` doesn’t come from the project solution itself, but through the debrief that follows.
The practical exercise and debrief usually take a couple of hours combined; and are among the most important parts of a whole collaborative project course. A range of potential stressors and solutions are surfaced and explored in ways that are about sharing learning and celebrating things that were innovative or worked well, rather than about blaming. Every `mistake` is actually a Learning Moment – some are just a little more disguised than others.
As a compressed version of what learners are likely to experience as part of their main project, learners come to realise that there will be times the pressure may be quite intense, both individually and for their teams. Me Time that allows them an opportunity to rest and recharge – to focus on themselves as an individual, rather than as a `cog in the project machine` seems not only possible but desirable.
Some team members may need more or less Me Time compared to others. There’s no one set amount of time that’s going to `work` for everybody in a team. People will need their Me Time when they need it – and their times don’t have to be the same as anybody else’s. Of course, there should be some communication with the rest of the team; some effort to ensure that one person’s Me Time doesn’t (wherever practical) put other people under unnecessary stress covering for them.
People who don’t feel guilty about taking their Me Time, or who aren’t made to feel guilty by others in the team for taking that time, are more likely to enjoy their rest and recharge break. That means they will come back to their tasks with more energy and creativity than they would have without taking the time away-from-task.
Me Time and self-care are critical concepts for both individual learners and teams. What makes them critical is not that people understand the theory behind them, but that they openly create an organisational culture where they are practiced as a normal part of how things are done around here. To paraphrase a famous maker of sporting goods: Just make it happen!
Rob Nelson Education 