The Value of Vague

"Hey Google. What should I do with my life?" If only the decision-making process was that simple.

This semester (January - April 2023), I am teaching a course called HEALTH 100: Foundations of a Healthy Lifestyle. It is a service course, meaning that I have students from all faculties (arts, engineering, environment, health, math, and science) and I have students from 1st - 4th year of study. One of the learning objectives of this course is for students to be able to critically appraise information and their own health. How do I get them to do this? Through reflective writing. Which they are unfamiliar with, and do not like. To my students I say: "You're welcome."

In the planning phase for this course, I considered ways to best support student success on this major assessment component. I could provide links to critical and reflective writing resources. I could verbally provide an example of how to connect information. But do I provide an exemplar? This was designed to be a scaffolded assignment, so should I scaffold the grade weighting? I ultimately decided the best way to support them was to not support them (in a sense) and let them figure it out on their own.

I told my students at the beginning of the term that many would struggle with the reflective writing assignments since critical reflective writing would be new to them - and that is OK! That is why we have 4 of them (worth 10% each). After they received feedback and marks on the first one, many students were frustrated. Some mentioned that they would have liked an exemplar. I took the opportunity to be transparent with my students and explain why the assignments are set up the way they are. First, if I provide an exemplar, what do you as the student do? They all agreed that they work to the example. Right. So, does that really help us to develop our critical reflective writing skills? No, not really - the class reluctantly agreed.

I also shared with students my thought process on how I determined the weighting of each assignment. I considered weighting assignments 1-4 at 5, 10, 15 and 20% respectively. This way, the earlier ones where we are still learning to reflect critically are worth less of our grade. BUT, then you as the student are more likely to view the later ones as "more important." Or that the content we are reflecting on as more important. This is not the case. Okay, so that is out. What if I drop the lowest of the 4 assignments? I could even say that as long as all 4 are submitted, I'll drop the lowest one. Great. But what do busy students do? The class agreed they would probably put low effort into one of them as they wouldn't care because it would be dropped. Since I value the purpose of the assignments and more importantly, I want YOU, the students to value the purpose of the assignments, what am I left with? As far as my brain can compute, equal weighting of all assignments.

I tried to impress upon my students the "value of vague." In this life, we will be faced with complex problems that are large, vague in nature, and un-Google-able.

Here's the example we worked our way through in one of our lectures:

"You are a graduating student and you and your partner have been together for 2 years. You have been applying to jobs and your partner has been applying to master's programs. You received job offers in Hamilton Ontario, Toronto Ontario, Halifax Nova Scotia, and Sydney Australia (you applied on a whim to that one).

Holy smokes Batman, how do we decide which job to accept? The points of consideration that we came up with as a class are below:

Salary	Livability of the city	Permanent vs. Contract Position
Benefits Package	Housing Availability	Perceived Job Satisfaction
Pension Plan	Housing Affordability	Commute Time
Relocation Funding Support	Transportation options in the city	Workplace Culture
Proximity to Family & Friends	City Recreation: sports, concerts, trails, restaurants, gyms, etc.	Company Reputation
Vacation Time	Parental Leave	Sick Leave

But wait, you haven't even factored in your BAE (before anyone else) yet! What if the only master's program they were accepted to was in Halifax, NS, and that employment position is really the last one you would choose to accept? What decisions do each of you make regarding your education, employment, and relationship status? I hate to break it to you but Google, Alexa, Siri, and ChatGPT can't give you an answer. Trust me - I've tried! See below:

While I personally believe in the value of vague as a means to teach students to think analytically, thoughtfully, critically, and creatively, I'm not sure they were really buying what I was selling. Being transparent with students is a large component of my philosophy towards teaching and education. I'm happy to continue to encourage students to value the process of learning over their GPA, but I'm not sure I've fully figured out how to do this. Maybe this is an area of vagueness that college and university instructors must value, and further explore themselves, in order to continue to help our students navigate this mindset.

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