RECIPROCITY, THE RASCAL OF RESOLUTION
Collaborative Problem Solving in an Online Role Play
Mary Keeffe and Lilian Austin
La Trobe University, Bendigo, Australia
Keywords: Online Role Play, Collaboration, Reciprocity, Critical Reflection, School Administration, Moodle.
Abstract: The capacity for experienced teachers to solve complex or contentious problems in the workplace is
improved when the teacher or school administrator is able to see the problem from the diverse perspectives
of all stakeholders and critically reflect on the decision making processes. These skills are particularly
important for special education teachers and administrators who must collaborate with parents, specialists,
therapists and colleagues to understand and address the educational needs of students with disabilities. This
paper applies an online, role play methodology to describe a model for reciprocity, collaborative problem
solving and critical reflection in contentious educational contexts. The role play involves ten roles shared
with twenty participants who have conditional access to three different virtual sites for dialogue, discussion
and reflection. This is a preliminary paper that describes the model of collaborative problem solving that
was used in addition to some detail about the technological structures developed on the LMS (Moodle) to
maximize the role play interface with all participants and to personalize the learning experience.
1 BACKGROUND
Each year a number of experienced teachers and
school administrators complete masters level studies
to expand and consolidate their understanding of the
professional requirements of their careers. In this
case, we examine the way that online role play in a
Masters level subject can facilitate an intimate
understanding of the complex needs of students with
learning difficulties and how school management
systems can respond effectively to contentious
situations. Most of the participants are teachers or
school administrators who aspire to leadership roles
in regular and special schools. The online program
includes various learning activities that aim to
inform participants of best practices that promote
learning and school responsiveness for students with
special needs. The problem for the program
developers was to give the participants direct or life
like experience in timely and informed problem
solving in the heat of the management of a
contentious situation in a school. At the same time,
the program planners wanted the group to
experience, first hand, the influence of diverse
perspectives that are often mixed with stereotypical
assumptions so they may be able to identify and
respond sensitively to these processes in daily
collaborations in their profession. The online role
play methodology that was developed in this study
provides a forum for: reciprocity, or understanding a
problematic situation from diverse perspectives
(Falk & Fischbacher, 2000); active and collaborative
problem solving (Habermas, 1981) in a safe learning
environment; and a structured and informed process
of critical reflection (Mezirow, 2000).
In her description of Community Literacies,
Lynda Flower (2008) explains how a rhetorical
community is able to apply diverse perspectives to a
contentious or problematic situation so that all
participants are actively involved in a collaborative,
problem solving process. In an ideal situation, the
learners in the community should progress beyond
the rhetoric of either management ‘speak’ or even of
well-intended words and ideas to understand the
extreme personal and professional contexts that
surround the issues under contention. Reciprocity, or
understanding a situation from diverse perspectives,
is an important part of problem solving that is
difficult to ‘teach’ in higher education. Values and
beliefs underpin the way we see the world and
management processes often compromise the
decisions that are made by school administrators.
Together, life values, stereotypes and management
constraints can result in a limited understanding of
the problems as they are experienced by all
stakeholders. As such, viewing a contentious
252
Keeffe M. and Austin L..
RECIPROCITY, THE RASCAL OF RESOLUTION - Collaborative Problem Solving in an Online Role Play.
DOI: 10.5220/0003917902520257
In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2012), pages 252-257
ISBN: 978-989-8565-07-5
Copyright
c
2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
situation from the perspective of the parent, teacher,
principal or student with a disability involves high
levels of communication skill and moral reasoning
that may extend beyond immediate or reactive
responses that can occur in school leadership
contexts (Kohlberg, 1973). The awareness that is
provoked in an online role play situation must also
include a critically reflective framework to support
an interrogation of personal values and beliefs and to
substantiate personal and professional changes in
behaviour that are related to the management of
contentious situations (Mezirow, 2000). The model
of collaborative problem solving described in this
paper has three distinct phases: reciprocity,
collaborative problem solving and critical reflection.
Each phase is described briefly in the next section
before the technical aspects of the role play are
explained.
2 A MODEL OF
COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM
SOLVING
2.1 Reciprocity
Although there are numerous explanations of the
notions of reciprocity, this paper adopts Kohlberg’s
(1973) moral preference that reciprocity involves
seeing the world from the perspective of another. In
a more detailed exploration of reciprocity, Falk and
Fischbacher (2000) augment familiar psychological
interpretations to propose that reciprocity cannot
only be determined by pure outcome related
consequences such as ‘kind actions will be met with
kind responses’. Instead they claimed the underlying
assumptions or ‘intent’ that surround the action will
predetermine the outcome to some extent. People
will shape their response to an action according to
the motives attributed to others. In a school context
where a student with Aspergers has been suspended,
teachers may respond in a limited, stereotypical or
rule based way if they are not able to understand the
motives of the student, parents or other stakeholders
as they collaborate or contrive various solutions to
the situation. Yet, understanding how others
experience an event, particularly one that may be
emotive or volatile, is a difficult and complex
sensitivity to teach, and even more so, in an online
medium. The online role play, as it was managed in
this study, provided the expectation and information
required for participants to experience the
complexities of a contentious situation from diverse
perspectives. As the role play progressed,
contentions arose that reflected real life experiences
that emerged from a range of sources not the least of
which were personality, pride, power, ambition,
love, distrust, finances, obligation, care, confusion,
rights, loyalty and so on. Participants were asked to
identify and understand the motivations for the
concerns exhibited in the role play and to propose
approaches that may resolve the problems identified.
2.2 Collaborative Problem Solving
The online role play then provided a situation where
the participants could implement an inquiry
approach into the complex dimensions of the
problem. They were asked to identify the issues
involved in the role play and investigate various
approaches to resolve the issues. Participants
accessed the literature to research policy, theory,
praxis and other influences relevant to the context.
As in all complex situations, the identified issues are
also influenced by emotions, goals, ambitions, skills
and abilities of all stakeholders. Habermas (1999)
explains how collaboration is a practice that is rarely
perfect but that each iteration or discussion will
expand common ground and inform participants of
shared expectations or otherwise. Fowler (2008)
describes how the process of rhetorical community
learning draws out the voices of the marginalized as
groups of people struggle to understand the social
ethic involved in the contentious situation. She
claims that differences can be transformed rather
than erased or contradicted when there is a
commitment to understanding the perspectives of
everyone involved. The online role play provides a
structured learning environment where an exchange
of differences can progress in a supportive and
informed way so that contentions may be argued
safely and possibly more creative options
considered. To facilitate a supportive and considered
response the participants in the role play needed
three spaces: one, a private asynchronous space to
discuss and reflect on the progress of events; two,
the public site of action where the role play took
place (asynchronous); and finally a debriefing
synchronous space in a virtual classroom on
Elluminate. The construction of these spaces will be
considered later in the paper.
2.3 Critical Reflection
The critical reflection phase of the online role play
had three main functions. In the first place it was
most important to debrief the participants of the
responsibilities, consequences and assumptions of
their roles. Although one aim of the role play was to
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253
develop a fictitious and rhetorical experience, the
emotional ownership that drove the responses in the
role play had to be contextualized as a learning
activity that deserved further investigation and
reflection. Next, the participants reflected on the
power, politics, processes and sub-contexts that
emerged in the role play to critically analyse who
was influencing decisions and how or why they did
this. The motivations for various actions by the
characters in the role play were analysed and
discussed with partners and colleagues before
participants referred to the literature to clarify their
insights. Finally, the participants applied the
relevance of the role play to their own professional
lives to consider how they would manage
contentious situations at their schools.
The purpose of the role play was to provide some
insight into the way various stakeholders viewed a
situation and how members of a learning community
could respond together to resolve a complex
situation. Participants were dissociated from their
roles so they could critically examine the
collaborative processes that were involved. The
critical reflection stage involves a formal debrief
during an synchronous Elluminate session and then
an interrogation of the data from all online spaces
within the role play. At this point, participants were
privy to all the character descriptors and their private
conversations in each room. This resulted in deeper,
yet post hoc understandings of the motivations and
considerations of each person’s role as they
responded to the various emerging situations.
Although each phase in the role play was
distinct, the organization and structure of the
technological methodology sustained a level of
necessary conflict in the role play to promote a
diverse range of collaborative interactions and to
sustain interest. A description of the organizational
components of the role play follows.
3 THE STUDY
The research question that guided this study was:
“How do you create an online learning environment
that gives participants experience and practice in the
management of a complex and contentious
situation?” and
“How do the direct interactions in the learning
experience enable reciprocity when participants are
actively involved in collaborative, online problem
solving of contentious situations?”
This study reports the experiences of one cohort
of Masters level students although the role play had
been conducted for two years previously. Ethical
permission was sought after the study was
completed to ensure the data was not influenced by
assessment requirements. A mixed method approach
provided data about the technical and personal
components of the research questions. Teddlie &
Tashakkorie (2010) recommend a mixed method
study when the nature of the data collected suits
different purposes. In this study, the quantitative
data provided information about the technical
aspects of the role play including access and
participation rates. The qualitative data provided rich
data about how the participants collaborated together
to respond to the unfolding dilemmas and finally
how they analysed and interpreted the motivations of
other characters both in the role play and in their
own professional lives.
Data analysis was broadly based on Weinberger
and Fischer’s (2006) four dimensions for analysing
argumentative knowledge construction in computer
supported collaborative learning environments
(CSCL). The interplay between the different roles,
rooms and reflections involved various dimensions
including: quantitative analysis of participation;
qualitative coding of epistemological viewpoints
such as moral and ethical considerations as well as
educational, sociocultural and relational
perspectives; the argument dimension within the
main discussion forum and the critical reflection;
and the socially constructed dimension of
collaborative problem solving within the various
meeting rooms.
4 THE ROLE PLAY
4.1 The Context
The initiating context was designed to heighten a
range of possible personal and organizational
responses. A student with Aspergers was suspended
from school after an incident in the playground.
From the outset, participants were predisposed to
respond in diverse ways. Each participant had access
to different information that informed his or her
view of the context in a particular way. Details of
the incident in the playground were initially unclear
and this created contention as participants tried to
clarify and resolve the implications of an
administrative decision to suspend a student from
the school.
4.2 The Characters
Ten roles were structured to include: a principal,
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teacher, parent, parents and citizens representative,
learning support teacher, student, friend of the
family who also had a child with autism, district
officer, parent of child who was involved in the
incident and a guidance officer. Each participant was
given a character portrayal, with a short role
descriptor that identified concerns about the
contexts. The character portrayal was deliberately
brief as participants were encouraged to develop
their character and justify the way they interpreted
events. Suggestions of characters’ values, priorities,
affiliations and personalities were made. For
example, the father, Tom Moody was given the
following descriptor:
You had warned the principal and the
guidance officer that your son was being bullied.
You feel your son is losing his intention to attend
school. You tried to tell the Learning Support
Teacher and the Guidance Officer about how
your son sees the world but they were no help.
You think the Principal and the Learning
Support Teacher are deliberately antagonistic.
Participants were partnered so two people played
each role. This had the advantage of deepening the
collaborative intent of the role play as partners
discussed the issues and reasoned an appropriate
response. Private, asynchronous forum spaces were
set up for each set of partners where they could
deliberate to determine the most appropriate
responses to each new perspective. Confidential
collaborations between partners helped to inform the
critical nature of the responses as the partners
provided a sounding board for interpretations of the
context and the other role players’ behaviours. The
confidential collaborations also helped to build
community as participants assumed the
responsibilities of their roles and characters.
Pragmatically, two partners were also able to
maintain a fast pace of multiple postings as each
participant accessed the role play at different times.
Rummel and Spada (2005) have suggested that
online collaborative problem solving is more
effective when there is some level of guidance and
structure so the lecturer played a character that
guided others towards collaborative possibilities
when necessary.
As well as the character descriptor, each
participant was also given an initiating action.
You receive a phone call from the principal
who tells you your son has been suspended. You
tell him how unhappy you are about the situation
and you insist that the protocols for the
departmental suspension policy should be
followed. An interview with the principal was an
essential prerequisite to suspension. Remind the
principal that this has not occurred.
After the initiating action, the participants could
develop their character in any way they chose. The
initiating action involved all participants in the role
play in the first instance. This resulted in an
enthusiastic start to the role play and the momentum
did not decline throughout the three weeks of the
active and collaborative problem solving phase.
The characters, the initiating action and the
context were outlined and discussed at a
synchronous Elluminate session two days before the
role play began. At this session, the purpose of the
role play, the assessment and the expectations of the
participants were clarified. Participants were
expected to engage with the role play daily and post
responses every few days or when necessary.
4.3 The Rooms
Three different asynchronous forum spaces were set
up on the LMS to facilitate the use of private and
public conversations and to create a life like
situation of selective access to information and
opinions. The forum spaces were visually displayed
as real life rooms so participants could easily
imagine entering the family home, the staff room or
the principal’s office. Only those rooms that the
participants could access were visible on their LMS.
Different people were allowed access to a
combination of rooms where they could have
conversations with other characters. For example the
teacher, learning support teacher and guidance
officer could access the staff room but the principal,
district administrator and parent were not able to see
the conversations being held there. The staff room
was used to clarify staff understandings of the
actions taken by the principal and discuss the
context and characters in an informal way. Similarly,
the parent, his friend and son could access the family
home and the principal’s office but not the staff
room. The implications of some participants having
privileged access to information and discussions
were designed to replicate real life situations where
agendas and situations evolve over time in complex
ways. The way each room was used in the rhetoric
of the role play informed the critical reflections for
the participants as these private conversations were
made public after the role play during the critical
reflection phase.
4.4 The Role Play
The flow and direction of the role play was
controlled entirely by the participants with some
guided provocation or support from the lecturer in
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255
role. Ten roles played by 20 people (approx.) in each
year provided a range of daily responses that
informed debate and developed contention. In the
three weeks that the role play was live in 2011 there
were 3,576 logs indicating a very active level of
participation that was similar in each year of the role
play (see Table 1. All activity, 2011). Participants
were able to call meetings, make phone calls,
question, respond, complain and explain their views
on various aspects of the unfolding drama. The
nature and functions of the contributions each
participant made were also coded in terms of
management ‘speak’, stereotypical assumption, or
informed participation. The data collected in each
category provided evidence for the participants to
write their critical reflections and discuss the
immediate influence of barriers to collaboration or
enhancers to problem solving as they were
experienced in each role.
Although Weinberger and Fischer’s four
dimensions of analysing argumentative knowledge
construction were helpful in organising the data
collected in each phase of the study, more research
is required to understand the relationships between
each construct in terms of the development of the
skills of reciprocity, collaborative problem solving
and critical reflection. Beach and Doerr-Stevens
(2007) speak of a rhetoric of significance and
transformation and although there is evidence of that
in the emotive participation in the role play and the
critical reflections that followed, more analysis of
the interplay of the broad participation in the forums
and the deep interpretations on the critical
reflections are needed. In this project, the site for
collaborative problem solving resided in the private
discussions shared between the participants in each
role. Future iterations of the role play need to make
the processes of collaborative problem solving
explicit so the experiences of each participant in the
partnered discussions may be expanded and
analysed more effectively.
Table 1: All activity 2011.
Date Student Lecturer Designer All
Nov 119 0 0 119
Oct 3329 105 41 3434
Sep 128 135 103 263
4.5 The Debrief
The statistics above and participant comments
indicated a high level of participative action and also
a level of compulsion to keep informed of the
progress of events. However, it was the emotional
ownership of the roles that each person played that
made the debrief session an integral part of the
process. The debrief explicitly separated the role
from the person and also signified an end to the
unfolding events. Comments such as: “I was really
angry with the principal” had to be understood in the
context of the role that was played and the scenarios
that evolved, not of the person who played the role.
This was done by identifying the issues that arose
during the role play and discussing them in a neutral
and future oriented way. Participants generally
moved their reflections from the contentions in the
role play, to similar issues at their school or in their
careers, to the literature, and to a broader range of
possible resolutions. It was only during the debrief
session that many participants were able to
emotionally withdraw from the action to fully realize
the rich learning potential of the role play.
“I valued the learning that happened on the role
play. I was completely absorbed in the events and it
has made me think differently about bureaucratic
decision making”.
“It was shocking to feel so isolated and ignored
as the parent”.
“I couldn’t wait to get home and get onto the site
to see what was happening.”
“My husband is really glad this is over because I
was online all the time - and he is still worried about
how the student is going to get back to school.”
“I really enjoyed the role play and now I will
miss everyone.”
5 CONCLUSIONS
The success of the management of the role play
depended on establishing a site where public and
private conversations were conducive to active
involvement by all participants. In effect, however,
the success of the learning experience depended on
the critical reflections that occurred during and after
the conclusion of the role play. Participants were
asked to choose and investigate an area of
contention that informed their understanding of the
issues involved. The final essays demonstrated a
sensitive awareness to the range and depth of
perspectives experienced by all stakeholders.
Participants were able to demonstrate significant
insights into the way that values, emotions,
personalities, needs and bureaucratic frameworks all
informed decisions in school administration, yet, the
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most important reflections involved understanding
how the diverse perspectives of all stakeholders
could contribute to progress acceptable solutions.
To demonstrate their understanding of the
contexts experienced in the role play, the
participants often used rich texts as direct quotes
from the role players. Although this was valuable for
the participants, it did not provide the lecturer with
any new insights as to how reciprocity or the
collaborative problem solving processes developed
as new knowledge. A better understanding of the
interactions between the layers, sites and dialogue
within the role play is required if the skills of
reciprocity, collaborative problem solving and
critical reflection are to be taught explicitly or if
future role plays are to be structured in a more
systematic way to enhance the learning experience.
Although Kohlberg has an explanation as to how
reciprocity or moral acuity can develop, his theories
do not explain what happened in the role play to
inform the development of a high level critical
awareness. In a similar way, a more comprehensive
analysis tool is required to clarify how a dialogic
community developed to overcome stereotypical
assumptions and progress towards problem solving.
Clearly, the interface between each role, each site
and each context informed that progress but the
analysis was unable to measure the depth or process
of that understanding.
Apart from further development of the analysis
of the processes involved, another limitation of the
role play is that it is text based and not in real time.
Many participants explained how they were pleased
to reflect on the postings before responding and the
time lapse allowed the collaborative discussion with
partners to be thoughtful and constructive.
Synchronous responses may not lead to such a
thoughtful approach yet the immediacy of real time
brings with it a life like experience. Perhaps the
further development of the role play may venture
into a 3D space where the immediacy of response is
vital and the personalities and contexts may be more
intuitive.
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Habermas, J., 1981. The Theory of Communicative Action.
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