Half an Hour

We don’t need to judge people to help them learn. True, we are vested almost to obsession in weighing, measuring and judging individual students. It’s hard to imagine an education system without tests, assignments and individual grades. But let’s try. Individual vs Collective Learning In military training at the Canadian Forces the focus is not on individual performance but rather what they call collective training . They are interested in how well teams achieve their objectives, and the focus in what they call the ‘after action review’ is on how to make the team more capable, not in evaluating how well each person performed. Similarly, when air crash investigators look for causes and solutions, the focus is not on assigning individual blame but on looking at how the entire system failed. They want to know how a pilot’s training led them to make the decision they did, or how radar equipment led an air traffic controller to lose track of a small airplane. Meanwhile, in more t...