Consensus Building: Triumphs and a Failure

This week, coincidentally, I finished up a cooperative exercise that was started last week.  It is an exercise that I developed last semester and have been refining every time I run it.  It usually works well at developing negotiation and consensus building, but this semester one group made a real mess of it.

I think I have previously mentioned here that I have to do a chapter on marriage.  I hate this chapter because I know nothing about marriage and my students aren’t even dating (there are a few campus couples now – so cute! – but that is the extent to which they know anything about relationships) so this chapter is especially worthless.  Also, everything in NorthStar is so fucking negative.  The whole chapter is about creating a prenup and developing norms associate with how important it is to have a prenup and readings and listening exercises about divorce and adultery.  All very important language for their future, I suppose. 

My solution has been to use two negotiating GW sessions that use vocab and require consensus building.  In the first exercise, I split the students into groups of three or four students and have them create a prenup.  The twist is that the group is itself a husband or wife (or are lawyers representing a husband or wife, if that is easier for them to conceptualize it) and they have to draft rules they want to be followed when they are married.  It is basic stuff -  who will work, can they smoke, who will do chores, etc.  – plus some of the nonsense they get from the book and my own weird shit that I think is funny and good to them to talk.  What is really fun to do in this exercise is subvert the expected norms.  I have groups of boys be a wife, and a group of girls acts as their husband.  Some of the students are pretty goofy about this and make humorous entries, but I don’t mind.  In this phase I only really care about them working as a group, getting everyone involved, and producing as a consensus driven group.  

The second part is a bit trickier.  Once the groups have come up with the rules they would like to impose on the other spouse, I have them negotiate with their spouse to create a single prenuptial agreement that both sides agree on.  I make the task clear: they have to come to an agreement and make one set of rules they all agree to follow.  If they do that they get married and leave happily ever after. After that I do some modeling for the class by negotiating problems in different ways.  I show them some ways to compromise, some ways to engage in horse trading, what a real impasse is and some ways to deal with problems.  Getting started can be difficult and I find I have to give a lot of initial guidance and support.  I find it works best if I work with each group and walk them through the first problem, show the problem and ways they can compromise, and then have everyone cheer and get them to work together on the next problem.  Often the students’ problems seem to be related to negotiating and critical thinking rather than language, but they adapt quickly.  Sometimes I will be helping one group and I’ll hear another group cheer – it’s a great sign to know they are working together to overcome a problem and succeeding.  It is also good to see that the groups change overtime as they work through problems.  And the gendering seems to get them to thing about aspects of fairness in their own expectations from their notions of what marriage should be like.

There have been some problems working with this.  In the past I had on one person from each group do the negotiating in front of the class.  That was fun, but too few students spoke.  I had them do it as a group, but the size was too big (4 and 4 makes 8 students trying to negotiate) to really get everyone involved.  Also, there were a lot of kids talking; it gets noisy and tough to move around and help everyone.  I need to make smaller groups in the future. 

But the real problem today was in the business class.  While most of the students were highly responsive to negotiating, a very important skill to have in English, there was one student who remained a jerk throughout.  This kid is just a selfish bully.  He is bigger, older and louder than the other kids and seems to have a higher place in the hierarchy and other boys go along with him.  Today he was just a turd in the punchbowl.  The rules he made for himself (the wife) were incredibly sexist and he refused to relent.  There was no negotiation, just badgering.  I appealed to him as a business student telling him thing of it as a contract for his company.  Would he want to take on all of the costs and none of the profit?  Yup.  Would he want a lawyer to treat him like this? Sure, this was his interest.  The girls in the group (who were the husband) were disgusted and pissed off.  My only recourse was to break the group into smaller parts and marginalize him.  He made the whole exercise a waste of time.  His group took the longest, didn’t complete the assignment and failed to create a consensus.  They were the only group to ever fail to reach an agreement and become married.  

This aspect of personality management is something I need to be more conscious of.  I should probably created groups instead of using the groups that existed, but that has its own costs since these students take all their classes together and already have strong bonds and quiet politics that I do not understand.  I’ll have to try something a little different next time.