August holds some significance in the Philippine educational system. Aside from being celebrated as Buwan ng Wika since 1997, it also marks the beginning of a new academic year for many schools and universities. For our university, however, it is the end of the last term of an academic year.
Beginnings and endings usually prompt people to reflect on how things have been, and how they would like them to be. This particular term-end, I’m reflecting on the level of competition and collaboration in the classroom.
What exactly is competition in academia? Nicole Brown of University College London aptly described it in a poem she wrote in a peer-reviewed article with Áine McAllister, which was published this year in Qualitative Inquiry, an academic journal.
“Compete”
Meet the essential criteria
Hit the desirables, several
publications. Not enough
experience in research
McAllister and Brown were of course talking specifically about the experiences of academic researchers. But the undergraduate classroom scene isn’t much different. Sometimes, students focus too much on meeting each item in the rubric to get the highest possible grade. This is not to discount the merits of a competitive environment in the classroom. Jonathan R. Anderson of the University of West Georgia, in his 2006 peer-reviewed article, “On Cooperative and Competitive Learning in the Management Classroom,” said that in competitive learning structures, students self-evaluate their abilities to master skills and knowledge relative to other students. This comparison or relative judgment can be a source of motivation. But we don’t need peer-reviewed articles to tell us that too much competition creates a hostile vibe in the classroom and unnecessary stress and anxiety among students.
Collaboration, on the other hand, “offers a space of extraordinary openness, a place of critical exchange, of possibility, creativity, and power” (McAllister, and Brown, 2024). In a college classroom, this usually involves letting students work together in activities such as games or simulations, case study analyses, presentations, and the like. Anderson (2006) confirms that these approaches lend themselves well to promoting knowledge, problem-solving, and innovation, but it also makes social loafing or freeloading so much easier, even with peer evaluation. I have noticed that there are students who still give their freeloading classmates high peer-evaluation grades despite their lack of contribution.
Clearly, there are benefits and detriments to competition and collaboration, and luckily the two are not mutually exclusive. But how do I as a management teacher ensure that I balance both to continually improve the atmosphere in my management classroom? Here are some oldie-but-goodie strategies I’d like to revisit.
• Implementing structured cooperative learning activities. Managers and educators have always found structure useful. Encouraging students to clearly define each other’s roles and responsibilities in a group activity promotes interdependence while allowing individual accountability.
• Promoting a growth mindset. A growth mindset, according to psychologist Carol Dweck, is the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through learning, and that failure can bring opportunities for improvement. This is contrasted with a fixed mindset, or the belief that individuals’ talents and intelligence are static and unchangeable. Promoting a growth mindset in the classroom means being patient with each other through the learning process. This means not abandoning group mates who turn in substandard contributions on the first try, but rather, encouraging those group mates to improve their contributions. A growth mindset also means acknowledging that you can learn and improve from the feedback of others.
• Incorporating reflection and feedback. Many academics already include peer and self-evaluations in their grading; however, these evaluations are usually done anonymously to avoid conflict among group members and can be used by students merely as a means to pull up their grades. Incorporating a brief reflection in the self-evaluation will allow students to consider how they could have contributed better to the activity. Hopefully, this will encourage them to rate themselves more fairly. Sharing group mates’ feedback with each student will also allow them to see how their efforts and contributions were viewed, which can serve as valuable input for improvement.
No, I certainly was not able to implement these strategies perfectly in the last academic year. But using a growth mindset, I know that I can make marginal improvements in how I execute them next term.
Liza Mae L. Fumar is a PhD in Business candidate at De La Salle University. This term, she taught Strategic Human Resource Management to undergraduate business students. She believes that marginal improvements are better than none.
