Providence College Students:
For starters, you might want to consider that, after having spent several
weeks together, your class is itself an organization capable of
description and analysis in systemic terms. To pursue that, of course,
you'll need a conceptual framework to guide you, and the most
growth-producing approach to getting such a framework is to create it
yourselves by moving back and forth between your increasingly
sophisticated model and the reality which drives the model. The central
question will be: What is it important to know to understand what's going
on here?
Here are possible major categories for such a descriptive/analytical
model. (Don't be put off by its familiarity. It's probably the oldest,
most sophisticated approach to modeling complex reality known.)
TIME
-The present
-Frequency and duration of scheduled class periods
-?
-?
STAGE
-Typically configured college classroom (seats in forward facing rows)
-Room temperature
-?
-?
ACTORS
-Size of class
-Male-female ratio
-?
-?
PLOT
-"The teacher's only going to give a limited number of "A" grades."
-"This is just another hoop to jump thru to get a degree and a job."
ACTION
-Everyone except the teacher ordinarily sits
-There's a majority vote on certain procedures such as ___________
-?
-?
One approach to evaluation:
"Define what, in your view, constitutes "success" for this class, decide
which element of all the above is most critical to its realization,
imagine the alteration of that element in any practicable way, and
speculate about the probable and possible outcomes of that alteration."
Good luck,
-- Marion Brady GMBrady@aol.com