Listening to the You Aren’t So Smart podcast recently – we all need to be reminded of that, every now and then – I was introduced to the concept of triggers for either a growth mindset or a fixed one. In essence, we can all get into the mood for entrenching our thoughts, feelings and beliefs, seeking to justify our current position by selecting our bias over counter-indicators. The guest speaker, psychologist Mary C. Murphy, author of “Cultures of Growth”, extended the concept to whole organisations as well as individuals. The alternative, she believes, is to recognise those negative associations and to try to redirect triggers into cultures of growth that can better support collaboration, innovation, performance, and wellbeing.

I sat in the pub last night after (possibly) my last ever day of teaching – it’s a long story – with a small (select?) group of my students. They are a special bunch. Second years on a closed course, BSc Computer Games Development, wondering what will come in next year’s final run out, given talks of redundancy. They aren’t alone in facing a vague future; several other courses are closing, and this is common across the UK sector.

It is not my first time having to see out a course – actually it is my third (or fourth?) – but what makes these students special (and they really are!) is that they help each other. They understand and recognise that they are their own best asset on the course; hopefully us tutors come a close second, but in any course with a sense of community there should be graceful collaboration. Not the corrosive, collusive kind. The ‘knowing what is appropriate to help learning’ sort. Lecturers can feel it when they walk into a classroom. Even when it’s not their class. If you’ve never experienced it, I pity you.

How do I describe it? It’s like the change in hum when a beekeeper opens up a hive. Or the ready thrum of a well tuned engine idling before a race. There’s an anticipatory intensity that washes over you. They become aware of your presence when you walk in, and are comfortable to gently acknowledge it before carrying on. I’ve had colleagues enter a room to catch me for a quick conference and the first thing they remark on is a feeling that important things are happening that they are sorry to be interrupting. Every time I smile. It isn’t me, or anything I’ve done really, other than, perhaps, encourage, foster and grow that communal spirit as best I can as the metaphorical beekeeper. I wish I could take the credit for more than polite intervention, when there are the few inevitable clashes.

Because of course there are clashes. Individual personalities can end with solitary students being isolated from that peer support. Then it gets tricky, and one or more shut down into a fixed mindset: why should I/we help THEM? However, thankfully, these situations have been few and far between. Students who think (or have constantly been told) they are “smart” are often those who feel unable to experiment, to fail, to leave their comfort zones for fear of being “found out” or otherwise judged if something goes wrong. If they don’t get that ‘A’ in class.

Encouraging students to see assessment (and learning in general, but this is what many are motivated by) as a process rather than a product is nothing new. If they can feel reassured the journey is more important than the destination, that failing and carrying on or knowing when to quit, students can feel more able to collaborate and, more importantly, ask for help.

It is the same for university leaders and lecturers – Leaders and Lecturers sounds like a terrible Role Playing Game – in that a fixed mindset reinforces the status quo, prevents innovation and change, and ultimately alienates everyone across the whole spectrum of Higher Education. I wish we could all be more like those students

Two recent worrying reports about USW, but not worrying for the obvious reasons:

https://www.business-live.co.uk/opinion-analysis/university-south-wales-seen-alarming-31300796
AND
https://nation.cymru/news/staff-unhappy-with-leadership-of-the-university-of-south-wales/

The latter of which involved a leaked document related to the results of a recent staff survey. I’d actually asked myself if this raw data was public, as the document itself was marked by Office365 as “Public”; documents can be marked Confidential, which restricts access through encryption, and this option has certainly been used recently in relation to redundancies.

The answer I was given was that it was on a USW SharePoint site, so only for USW staff. However, as a Government funded body, USW like all universities in the UK, is subject to freedom of information legislation. There should be no confidentiality unless for a valid reason; FoI has exceptions in law, which is right and proper. While I acquiesced to the implicit “don’t share” reply I received, someone took the “public” tag on the document at face value, it seems.

What is weird about the Nation Cymru article is, firstly, their use of the term “leaked”, because it was a “public” document; the distribution of publicly funded information isn’t leaking. It is dissemination, which academics should thrive on.

The second concern is the “lecturer at the university who didn’t wish to be named” being quoted. I’m guessing here that it was this person who ‘leaked’ the document. The problem (and it can be seen two ways) is the ‘not wanting to be named’ bit, either because of the fear of reprisals – if they are found out this would compound matters – or the lack of taking responsibility. This is, of course, assuming that the sharing of public information is in fact misconduct?

I think, this unnamed lecturer should be able to make such comments freely, openly, and not be afraid of the consequences. The raw data is pretty damning, but the Nation Cymru coverage goes little further than the highlights disseminated in the official summary infographic distributed to staff on the USW Intranet, which gives the most positive spin on the better sides of the survey. This isn’t misrepresentation. There ARE some positives in staff attitudes captured by the survey. It just disappears when the questions relate to the leadership.

For me, the most important elements are very high levels of harassment being reported. For example, and this is eye opening, 80% of Executive responded to the survey – generally it was two thirds of workers in different categories – but 100% of them reported experiencing harassment. All of them.

There were other less than ideal nuggets, but (and this is the point of a staff satisfaction survey) we shouldn’t be afraid of the negatives. They allow us to address the problems, when often they are hidden otherwise; such as in an environment of fear, where people feel unable to speak out for fear of reprisals.

ENDS

* “The construction not only….but (also) is called a correlative conjunction. It is used to present two related pieces of information. Both pieces of information are being presented by the writer as surprising or unexpected, with the second one being even more surprising than the first.”

— https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/eb/qa/not-only-but-also