by Terry Heick
Quality: you know what it is, but you don’t know what it is. But that is contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, everything goes away! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what quality is, how do you know what it is or how do you even know it exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes, it really exists.
In Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenanceAuthor Robert Pirsig talks about the elusive idea of quality. This concept, and the “Church of Reason” tangent, interrupt him throughout the book, especially as a teacher when he tries to explain to his students what quality writing looks like.
After some difficulties (internally and with students), he scraps letter grades altogether in the hopes that students will stop looking for reward and start looking for “quality.” This, of course, does not turn out as he expected; The students rebel, which only distances him from his goal.
So what does quality have to do with learning? Turns out, quite a bit.
A shared sense of what is possible
Quality is an abstraction: it has something to do with the tension between a thing and a thing. ideal stuff. a carrot and a ideal carrot. A speech and a ideal speech. the way you because the lesson to follow and the way it actually unfolds. We have many synonyms for this idea, with “good” being one of the most common.
For quality to exist – for something to be “good” – there has to be some shared sense of what is possible and some tendency toward variation: inconsistency. For example, if we think there is no hope for something to get better, it is useless to call it good or bad. It is what it is. We rarely call walking good or bad. We just walk. Singing, on the other hand, can definitely be good or bad, that is, having or lacking quality. We know this because we have heard good songs before and we know what is possible.
Furthermore, it is difficult for there to be a quality sunrise or a quality drop of water because most sunrises and most drops of water are very similar. On the other hand, a “quality” cheeseburger or a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony makes more sense because A) we’ve had a good cheeseburger before and know what’s possible, and B) we can experience a big difference between one cheeseburger and another.
Returning to learning, if students could see quality (identify it, analyze it, understand its characteristics, etc.), imagine what that requires. They have to see a thing in all its aspects, compare it with what is possible and make an evaluation. Much of the friction between teachers and students comes from a kind of confrontation between students and teachers who try to guide them towards quality.
Teachers, of course, are only trying to help students understand what quality is. We describe it, we create rubrics for it, we point to it, we model it, and we sing its praises, but more often than not, they don’t see it and we hold it closer and closer to their noses and wait for the light to turn on.
And when they don’t, we assume they don’t care or aren’t trying hard enough.
The best
And the same goes for relative superlatives: good, better and optimal. Students use these words without knowing their starting point: quality. It’s hard to know what quality is until you can think of something to begin with. And furthermore, to really internalize things, they have to do his quality. Quality for them based on what they see as possible.
Qualifying something as good – or “better” – requires that we can first agree on what that “thing” is supposed to do and then discuss that thing in its native context. Consider something simple, like a lawnmower. It is easy to determine the quality of a lawnmower because it is clear what it is supposed to do. It is a tool that has some degrees of performance, but is primarily like an on/off switch. Either it works or it doesn’t.
Other things, like government, art, technology, etc., are more complex. It is unclear what quality looks like in legislation, abstract painting, or economic leadership. There is both nuance and subjectivity to these things that make quality assessment much more complex. In these cases, students have to think “macro enough” to see the ideal functions of a thing, and then decide whether they are working, which of course is impossible because no one can agree on which functions are “ideal” and we are back to zero. Like a circle.
Quality in students’ thinking
And the same goes for teaching and learning. There is no clear and socially agreed cause-effect relationship between teaching and the world. Quality teaching will produce quality learning that does not this. The same goes for students themselves: in writing, reading, and thinking, what does quality look like?
What causes it?
What are its characteristics?
And most importantly, what can we do to not only help students see it but also develop eyes that refuse to close?
Being able to see the circles in everything from their own sense of ethics to the way they structure paragraphs, design a project, study for exams or solve problems in their own lives, and do so without using adultisms and external labels like ‘good job’, ‘excellent’, ‘A+’ and ‘you’re so smart!’
What can we do to develop students who are willing to sit and reflect on the tension between possibility and reality, bending everything to their will moment by moment with affection and understanding?
