Chapter 6 Perceptions of Leadership and Collaboration
6.5 Decision-Making in Groups: “Justice and Evil”
6.5.1 Introduction
Collaboration is generally understood to foster innovation in a way that individuals working separately on a group project cannot. However, it is a complex process that requires inclusive decision-making, enabling those who contribute ideas to feel that their ideas are valued—and fairly evaluated—within the development of the project. Sustaining the collaborative quality depends on how a sense of equity and diversity is experienced among group members during moments of judgment (Rowe et al., 2021). It is therefore particularly important to consider the nature of decision-making among collaborators.
Collaborative decision-making can be challenging within an educational environment that maintains hierarchy and conformity as cultural norms. When I began my doctoral journey, I had hoped that revelations about group-decision making processes in QOED would be the basis of my entire thesis; that I would find strong exemplars of how QOED teachers were facilitating pluralistic dialogues and then stepping back and watching collaboration flourish.
Instead, I found it difficult to elicit stories related to how groups made choices. When I discussed group decision-making, the reflections from my interviewees tended to focus on
right/wrong binaries. Such decision-making generally adheres to an optimum postulate, which is based on the belief that, ultimately, it is possible to identify the best decision (Roy, 1996). This decision is the one legitimised by either the authority of the decision-maker, or by an alignment of the decision to existing norms and standards. Inevitably, a competitive
“zero-sum game” (Von Neumann & Morgenstern, 2007) among decision-makers is created:
one response to the question will need to beat another response to the question. The
perception of an optimum postulate can thus seem antithetical to the process of collaborative decision-making, as the assumption of a right answer can limit innovative ideas to those that fit within existing paradigms. Such a positivist approach to group decision-making presents a significant contrast to co-design processes prevalent in collaborative art and design practices, which enable more complex syntheses of the ideas presented (Steen, 2013). My interviewees nevertheless repeatedly referred to group decisions using terms such as “good”, “better” and
“best”, emphasising the perception that collective decision-making presents a selection process in which there is a perfect choice, rather than a synthesising process with ever- diversifying responses.
Through the following narratives, I therefore illustrate how the teachers’ reflections on decision-making within groups can reveal underlying concerns regarding how difference and diversity are valued within the teaching of QOED. This involves exploring how teachers’
interventions in group decision-making processes can be authoritative, maintaining the perception that groups require hierarchical leadership models (from either within or beyond the group). As previously discussed in this chapter, the ways that teachers manage socialised learning interactions in the classroom can have a significant influence on how learners perceive the value of each other, and each other’s differences and diversity, as an aspiration within a pluralist society. This again suggests how a more explicit rationalisation of collective decision-making may help teachers to sustain a clearer sense of educational purpose within the teaching of QOED.
6.5.2 Stimulating Decisions: “Built on This Idea”
Among the QOED teachers that I interviewed, their participation within group decision- making processes took different forms. In some instances, teachers’ interventions involved prompts to enhance the direction of the group. In other instances, teachers affirmed particular ideas already expressed within the group, with the teacher prompting students to be more
open to each other’s ideas and to build on them. In yet other instances, participation involved the teachers evaluating the decisions already made by the students within the groups. While these all might be considered to be pedagogically valuable interventions, it might also be argued that they sustain a sense of the authority of the teacher as the decision-maker in all learning, thus challenging the collaborative autonomy of these groups.
The following reflection identifies the moment when the teacher felt the group needed to focus for their project, and hence required further direction. It occurred during an
interdisciplinary task (see Baumgarten & Langton, 2006): students drew on the visual art of calligraphy to generate dance movement sequences. She explained,
In the task of yongzi bafa [永字八法; Eight Principles of Yong] everyone chooses a calligraphy stroke to make a body movement. Students gather together in small groups to create a group choreography based on these eight strokes. In one class, a boy in one group was struggling with developing his idea. He was chubby and a bit clumsy and he tumbled backwards when trying to sit down slowly. I tried to make him feel okay by emphasising how graceful this could be if he does the movement like that, in slow motion. He did this and when others in the group saw him, they just built on this idea and changed the speeds of their movements. Then their group was happy because, as soon as their actions were slow, they were interesting.
Within this form-based choreographic task, the learners were expected to innovate with the form of movement rather than its expressive dimension, by abstracting a shape-based concept from one context (writing) and transferring it to another (dance). Such form-based tasks can sometimes challenge students who are more familiar with expression-based prompts (such as:
create a dance about sadness and longing) as a basis for creativity (Lavendar, 2009). In this context, the teacher sought to enable the group’s independence (see Meyer et al., 2008) through a suggestion to vary the dynamics of the movement (see Foster & Preston-Dunlop 1977). While this intervention perhaps enabled the learners to better comprehend the task, it might be argued that such a directive method sustained the authority of the teacher in the classroom and inhibited the learners from engaging in collaborative decision-making. The teacher further explained that she felt that the learners were engaged in a tacit form of decision-making in groups, as the other learners simply followed the learner that she had instructed. This interpretation of the activities seems to disregard the potential that other learners in the group overheard her instruction and felt that it was an appropriate direction for them as well.
6.5.3 Providing Direction: “I Will Give You a Name”
In other contexts, the teachers described ongoing involvement in the group’s creative decision-making processes. Once students had come up with some initial ideas, the teachers took a more directive approach. One interviewee described a dialogue that she had with learners during a small group choreographic task,
I said, ‘What are you making up?’
The students said, ‘We are killing people’.
I said, ‘How do you kill people? Let me take a look’.
They did actions like from a fighting game. I said, ‘I’ll give you some advice. I think you are very vivid in killing people, but I think you also need to be noble. I will give you a name - Justice and Evil - and then you link these things you created. But you have to think about whether the final victory should be justice or evil’.
They said, ‘The teacher’s idea is good, we know’.
In the end, they compiled such a work. In the end, the justice and evil they compiled were very good: the one who represented justice was a big fat man, and he got a series of shots, the evils fell to the ground, and then justice won. Finally, when the justice characters stepped back, the evil characters all got up from the ground.
I said, ‘Why are evil ones alive again?’
They said, ‘Justice and evil are in an eternal battle’.
I think they have a lot of ideas, but they need a teacher to provoke them to bring these out.
Here, the teacher sought to shift the learners’ creative ideas from a representation of violence to a more narrative form. By prescribing characters of “Justice and Evil”, the teacher
prompted the students to consider how their violent dance movements could be extended into a choreographed dance through the framework of a story. This led the students to feel that their initial ideas were valued, encouraging their further development.
While this does not reveal how decisions were undertaken within the group, it does emphasise how a QOED teacher may perceive their own educational purpose within
collaborative tasks. Illustrated by her belief that students “need a teacher to provoke them to
bring these out”, she considers that the role of the teacher within small group tasks clearly involves intervention in group activities. This approach is informed by arguments that student groups can go off-task without deliberate teacher intervention (Chiu, 2004), yet such
intervention can debilitate student collaboration if it is prolonged (Ding et al., 2007). To understand the value of teacher interventions in students’ collaborative dialogues, it can be worth considering the intent of the intervention (Hoffman & Mercer, 2016), and how it may be “authoritative, orchestrating and unleashing” (Kajamaa et al., 2020, p. 371). That is, the teacher’s intervention may be intended to direct the students into a perceived correct way of doing something (authoritative), to facilitate more collaborative dialogue and action within the group (orchestrating) or to push the group to critically think beyond their current paradigms and challenge their conceptual boundaries (unleashing).
In the above excerpt, the teacher’s intervention appears to be both authoritative, directing the students to follow a prescribed narrative path, and unleashing, enabling them to think beyond their original idea. Of particular relevance to this thesis, processes that maintain the teacher’s authority within the collaborative project potentially undermine the learning group’s sense of autonomy and their development of self-efficacy. This raises the question as to whether an intervention that adopted an orchestrating approach in this instance might have allowed the learners to find their own solutions, to better prepare them for an unleashing approach in which their ideas are challenged and then extended further. Exploring these understandings of the teacher’s role in group decision-making may help reveal a clearer sense of educational purpose for QOED teachers.
6.5.4 Orchestrating Discussion: “Her Idea is Very Good”
Some of the teachers’ involvement in group decision-making processes did reflect a more orchestrating approach: they sought to enhance the quality of the collaborative dialogue, rather than present directions for the task. One teacher reflected on how her purposeful intervention in group deliberations stemmed from a concern that some individual voices in groups might be overwhelmed by more dominant members. She explained,
When I walk around, I mainly focus on their ideas. I think there will be competition naturally, because whoever’s idea is better will decide in group work. There is always an active student who holds the leading role feeling that they have better ideas. I think the most important thing is to balance this. If there is a student who does not like to talk, but she expresses her point of view, and if I hear it and find that this point of
view is particularly good, I will go to the group to encourage her immediately. I might say, ‘I think her idea is very good and it can be further deepened’.
In this way I give a kind of guidance to this group, and the students will naturally feel that this idea is really good. They will say, ‘let’s discuss it and study it’.
The leading student in the group should not expect that her ideas will always be good in a semester. If I find her idea is not very good, then I will listen to the opinions of other students in this group. If I found the other students’ ideas to be very good, I will recommend the group to that.
Then the students will collaborate naturally.
While this teacher is encouraging of greater equality and diversity within the dialogue, she does not appear to recognise how her latent authority as a teacher (see Perumal, 2008) might sustain the power relation. While the guidance that she offers validates the ideas of students with a lower status in each group, this validation still relies upon the teacher’s higher status as the teacher in the classroom. This might therefore be seen as simply a continuation of
authoritarian pedagogy and hierarchical decision-making processes. Group decision-making research suggests group consensus reaching is a dynamic process that requires a confident sense of the group’s self-determination (Pérez et al., 2011). The above narrative therefore raises the question as to how a teacher may better empower students to engage in this form of social regulation among themselves (Hesse et al., 2015) so that their groups can engage in more autonomous decision-making.
This narrative also reveals a belief within the teacher that the mindsets and behaviours of learners in the classroom are inherent, rather than constructed. She repeatedly indicates that things simply are the way they are, as students “naturally” compete to have their idea accepted, “naturally” feel that the teacher’s suggestion is good, and ultimately, “naturally”
collaborate once the teacher recommends an idea. Her reflections suggests an unawareness of the influence of the educational climate on student behaviours and attitudes within small groups. It might alternately be argued that decision-makers act competitively within a competitive environment (Malter & Dickson, 2001). This competitive mindset might be rooted in the examination-oriented education philosophy in China (Cheng, 2022; Dello- Iacovo, 2009; Jin & Martin, 2019). It might also be constructed by the view (expressed by the interviewee teacher) that ultimately “whoever’s idea is better will decide in group work”, that is, a belief in an optimum postulate (Roy, 1996). As previously discussed, adhering to this
belief can inhibit the emergence of complex and innovative ideas, as these may contrast with a dominant logic. In some group contexts, it could be argued that an optimum postulate is useful if it resolves a group tension, particularly one that is rooted in procedural conflicts (Behfar et al., 2011). Such procedural conflicts describe tensions that arise from the way sub- tasks are organised and undertaken within a group (i.e., expectations of who should do what and when). These contrast with tensions emerging from relationships and behaviours in the group, and tensions emerging over conceptual ideations of the task (Jehn & Bendersky, 2003). Within the narrative above, it appears that the competition is taking place in the conceptual design of the task, which is where a collaborative decision-making process is perhaps most important. That the teacher accepts these task-concept decisions will inevitably be subject to competitive mindsets is a significant point to note, as it emphasises the
importance of teachers gaining a more explicit metacognition of the collaborative process (Rowe et al., 2021).
While the teacher may not be aware of how the educational environment might construct a social climate that prompts people to compete, she nevertheless recognises the problems that emerge when this competition is dominated by singular voices in a group task. She therefore guides group members to value more marginal voices within the group, rather than put forward her own idea (as the teacher in the previous narrative did). She further hopes to inspire students to consider these voices on the merits of the idea, rather than on the status of the individual sharing it. This might be seen as a constructively egalitarian intervention that can distribute decision-making power within the group. In doing so, this teacher recognises the impact of the leading student or Xueba (Jiao, 2019, p. 27), who is regarded as an
exemplar in classroom groups. Other students can feel safer and prefer to follow the Xueba, as Xueba reflects the ideal model for students (Jiao, 2019). So, in this context, the teacher is revealing the fallibility of the Xueba, and the possibility that students with a lesser status may nevertheless have a valuable idea.
6.5.5 Consolidating Leadership: “Let Her Decide”
Among my interviewees, the function of the teacher to consolidate leadership also emerged as a key theme. This was particularly evident within one of the group tasks in QOED that required students to develop a group teaching plan. To carry out the task, a hierarchy of roles was prescribed: a “main teacher” and a few “teaching assistants”. The appointment of this
type of leadership structure can nevertheless lead to differences of opinions as to how the task may be designed. As the following interviewee explained, such differences of opinion can lead to teacher intervention in order to consolidate the lead student’s authority:
When the group members don’t agree with each other, they will come to find me. For example, regarding the lesson plan ‘a day of labour’, some students think that they do not need to give limitations. Others in the group think that they should limit the context, such as ‘a day in the forest’ or ‘a day in the classroom’, or even limit the focus further to ‘planting trees’. Some students may say that they should not group students in the beginning, that they need to teach some movements, then group the students. Other students think that they should group students, to get movements from students, and then decide the next section.
In this situation, I will ask, ‘Which forms could express the style of your teaching?
For example, when you teach, do you think you can handle the way of teaching students your movements first, or can you control the rhythm of the class to make students to create movements first?’
I will then give some power to the main teacher and let her decide.
While the teacher’s educational purpose in this narrative appears to involve enhancing the ability of the group to determine their own decisions, the authority of the teacher to ultimately determine who in the group should make the decisions might be seen as simply an extension of an authoritarian pedagogy (Liu, 2020). Of particular relevance to this thesis, the decision- making guidance described by the teacher in this narrative further emphasises an optimum postulate mindset: that ultimately such questioning should reveal a better or worse choice.
While the teacher’s intervention here was undertaken with an intention to orchestrate rather than be authoritative (Kajamaa et al., 2020), it nevertheless involved a reductive decision- making process that did not prompt further possibility thinking or pathways for the students.
This may be because the teacher considered this to be a procedural conflict, rather than a conceptual conflict (Behfar et al., 2011), and so did not perceive the disagreement as an opportunity for further speculation and exploration, but as a problem that needed to be resolved. This idea of an optimum postulate may lead to more polarising viewpoints however, particularly given that no model could logically be “better” in the context of a social phenomenon. Here, further polarisation might eventuate, leading to further
disagreements and dissent among group members (Dong et al., 2019). The role of the teacher in stimulating a collaborative dialogue might therefore warrant further consideration.
6.5.6 Conclusion
The narratives that my interviewees shared regarding group-decision making processes generally focused on their interventions. This does not mean that learners in QOED classes were not engaging in vibrant collaborative dialogues and collective decision-making; teacher descriptions of the activities that learners were engaged in illustrate physical, collectivised, creative processes. It is perhaps significant, however, that my interviewees tended to foreground their role in this decision-making process. I do not interpret this as vanity or arrogance on the part of the teachers, particularly as they generally expressed a modest perception of their own abilities and actions in the QOED classroom. It might however be argued that this focus on their own role indicates their sense of responsibility to equitably and constructively manage learner interactions, and an anxiety over relinquishing this in more learner-led activities (Iversen et al., 2015).
Only one story emerged in which the teacher was genuinely appreciative of the ways that group members were managing to make choices among themselves. She reflected as follows:
I found that in this group every group member played their part in different sections.
Some students were more creative, and they were willing to participate in the guidance and creation of movements. There was a girl called Sisi in this group who was good at liberal arts. She was not so motivated in the movement creating section, but in the making poem section, her motivation impressed me. The group of them were lying on the ground, putting the small notes of the words I gave on the ground, and combining them back and forth. Then they discussed which kind of verse was more interesting, and they would discuss whether it was good, and then write down the verse. This little girl with good liberal arts gave more suggestions in the text.
Some of the conjunctions in the middle and the order of the entire sentence, including poetry, were decided by Sisi. This was the part that I was more impressed with. The group knew that her liberal arts was better, so they wanted to cooperate with her and gave her a more important task at this stage.
This anecdote might be interpreted in diverse ways and reveal various issues related to collaborative decision-making and the valuing of differences. I found myself circling around this story as a key moment of inspiration, and I drafted different approaches to its
presentation in my thesis. I present it here as a concluding narrative within the discussion chapters of my thesis however, simply because it beautifully illustrates how a teacher can enjoy just observing and analysing the ways that a group of students can behave collectively and autonomously to support each other towards a shared creative outcome. I can imagine