Creating excellence: quantity or quality

Imagine your aim is for your pottery class students to produce the most beautiful piece of pottery that they can, not the primitive, rough looking Edomite figure Hartmann shows us on page 73 of Quest, but something really well designed and perfectly made. Which is the better way to tell them that they will be graded: by the total weight of all their work for the term, or by one piece of work chosen by them as their best piece?

In "Viewpoint: How creativity is helped by failure," Matthew Syed argues that creativity and excellence in art, technology, animated films and science come not from aiming at perfection the first time but by trying things out and making many mistakes (2015). Syed further reports that academic institutions increasingly show the series of failed attempts that often underlies brilliant finished products in art, science theories, cartoons, technology and elsewhere in order to help students better understand the creative process for their own work.

One of Syed's examples is the experiment that tested what my lead in question asks. The answer is that the students who had been told they would be graded simply by weighing how much pottery they produced over the term produced higher quality work than the students who were told they would be graded on the quality of one piece of work. That is, the students who turned up with 50 kg also produced, along with a lot of rubbish, higher quality work than the group who were told they would be judged on their one best piece of work weighting perhaps 0.2 kg,  Naturally, this somewhat surprising result needs an explanation, and Syed has given it.

But  what caught my attention was the relevance to our class. As Hartmann acknowledges when she includes both an academic writing exercise and a response writing exercise in every chapter of her book, it's important to work on both quality and on quantity. In the academic writing exercises we do, such as the almost concluded one on the image on page 165 of Quest, we worry very much about quality, even proofreading to fix spelling mistakes, wrong use of articles (a / an / the / -), and prepositions, along with more substantial errors such as part of speech, wrong word choice and lack of a main clause. In addition, and more importantly, we worry about the ideas and organization of a piece of academic work, which your revision, after reading your classmates' work, did much to improve.

Our response writing is more for quantity, but as Syed reminds us, that is a great help to quality. When we blog, we can write at ease, we can try out new ways to express ourselves, play with new structures and so on. And we get feedback in how our classmates respond to our ideas. Disagreement is especially important here as it is in our academic writing. When you were looking for ways to strengthen your answer about Hartmann's chosen image to introduce the topic abnormal psychology, the most useful of your classmates first drafts where the ones that said your answer was wrong: these presented you with ideas you needed to be able to overcome to persuade your classmates to change their minds. And of course, they were looking at your opposing ideas to persuade you that you were wrong. Similarly, disagreement, or a simple request to clarify, helps us to spot and correct possible weaknesses in our writing, and this practice gradually makes those weaknesses less likely to occur.

So blog every day.

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Reference

Syed, M. (2015, November 14). Viewpoint: How creativity is helped by failure. BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34775411