"Experience Base" Learning:
A Classroom-as-Organization Using Delegated, Rank-Order Grading
Roger Putzel
Saint Michael's College
St. Michael's College
Winooski Park
Colchester, Vermont
05439-0211
Telephone: (802)
654 - 2458
rputzel@smcvt
"Experience Base" Learning:
A Classroom-as-Organization Using Delegated, Rank-Order Grading
by
Roger Putzel
St. Michael's College
Summary
A management and organizational behavior class designed as a new paradigm (sociotechnical)
organization expands the class-as-organization (CAO) model.
Groups of students take different administrative roles and teaching
responsibilities. Helped by a
detailed manual, students manage, teach, and evaluate their peers.
An elaborate control (grading) system makes this learning organization
effective. Rank-order peer grading
eliminates tests. Conflict occurs,
but eventually students, like members of an autonomous work group, learn to
manage responsibly. The professor
delegates most tasks and becomes a coach but must contend with the college
grading system and teaching colleagues unaccustomed to rank-order peer
evaluation.
Delegating Grading in the
Classroom-as-Organization
In the 1990s Business schools are feeling pressure to prepare their students
better for the real world (Porter and McKibbin, 1988; Wall Street Journal, June
6, 1990), a world alien to the student's experience in an ordinary classroom.
In most courses students respond to hypothetical, written cases rather
than to actual facts, responsibilities and consequences that characterize
management in "the real world." A
book, a case, or a teacher describes a situation which the students pretend to
face. Their immediate reality, however, consists of a group of people in a room,
and the task which many students set for themselves
is to get a good grade (Time, July 16, 1990; Smith, 1990).
Many students take grades just as seriously as a company's employees take pay or
performance appraisals. Grades have
that real-world feel. When teachers
tell students to forget grades, to focus on learning, and to judge themselves by
how much they learn, they depreciate the students' real world.
Meanwhile, "out there," managers of world-class manufacturing,
sociotechnically designed, "new paradigm" organizations are delegating
control over specific workplaces to groups of workers who typically manage
responsibly and may even evaluate each other. In a CAO (Classroom-as-Organization) managed according to the
new paradigm, where grading and other class management functions are judiciously
delegated, students evaluate each other and responsibly take control.
The Context: a "New Paradigm"
CAO (Classroom As Organization)
All CAOs form organizations and use their experience to learn
about management or organizational behavior.
In most CAOs students apply theory to cases and to their experiences in
groups; all groups have the same function; each group works independently, while
the teacher administers and runs the class.
In my Management and Organizational Behavior course, we apply theory primarily
to our own experience, that is to structures, procedures, events, and people in
the class. Groups have different
functions, take responsibility for administering and running the class, and must
work together for the organization to succeed.
The first day of the course I introduce myself and then introduce students who
have taken the course before. I
announce that these veterans of the course have returned temporarily to help us
get started. Then I sit down.
After the first minute of the course, if someone else can do what's
needed, I don't do it. I get things done through other people; I manage.
The veterans welcome new members to "The Experience Base" (XB), a
learning organization based on a learning cycle (Figure 1). In this organization
new members will join one of three groups in one of four departments, each group
having unique administrative and teaching responsibilities.
Each member will also belong to another group for discussing reading
outside class; these groups form a matrix across departments (Figure 2).
Veterans and the course syllabus warn new members that they will feel
frustrated for much of the course and that they will have to grade each other.
Veterans answer questions for the first class period and then usually
leave new members to fend for themselves.
The answer to many questions is "That's in the manual";
XB does impose structure. A
handbook I produce, The XB Manual (1990)
spells out in minute detail how the different departments and jobs should
function ‑ unless members have a better idea. The book also helps the reader apply management and OB
theories and tools to managing the XB Organization.
Each group reads its own part of the manual and other text assignments on that
group's topics; so by the third
week (in theory) the organization has done all the reading for the semester.
The organization must then exploit its internal resources.
Each group has staff responsibility for teaching members of other groups
specific topics which it has learned as these topics apply to XB.
Following written instructions, some groups make presentations similar to those
in other experiential, OB courses. Others
achieve their objectives by approaching individuals outside class and getting
them to do something differently.
Though they can read what to do, members usually take three weeks to get used to
not being told what to do, i.e., to
feeling like managers, not students. They
struggle to find out how the organization functions, and they learn that they
‑ or no one ‑ will make XB work.
By design, some disorder ensues. Following
the manual doesn't make this organization work (or any other):
some members sit back and let others work, and then important sectors of
the organization do not function as they should.
Most groups don't work effectively because they only know their own
material; the communications people don't plan, the planners don't listen, etc. But XB wouldn't succeed as a learning organization if it
functioned smoothly. Disorder
creates opportunities for learning, and theories and concepts of management and
organizational behavior offer excellent diagnostic tools for understanding what
is going on and for making the organization more effective.
A modicum of chaos motivates people to learn the fundamentals:
setting and reaching objectives, rational decision making, functional
authority, effective delegation, the stages of group development, and so on.
The groups also exercise specific line responsibilities, running every possible
administrative aspect of the organization, including scheduling topics for
upcoming meetings (classes), planning the agenda for each meeting, moderating
discussion, and making sure that members do certain things regularly (such as
use the central computer to communicate with other members).
I could do most of these administrative tasks better than any member but
could never do all as well as they do.
Managers and teachers add most value from the sidelines of the action.
So I cut programmable tasks and specific responsibilities from the
teacher's job and try to act like a coach during a scrimmage.
But, though members evaluate each other throughout the term, the key
issue of grading sticks like peanut butter on my knife and draws me reluctantly
back into the action.
How XB Grades
The control (grading) system is designed to put powerful and useful measuring
and motivating tools into the hands that need them, those of the
students/members of XB. It has
three distinctive features: quantity,
delegation, and rank-ordering.
1) Quantity.
We collect about 135 measurements of each person's performance during the
semester, so much data that there is no doubt about how well that person is
doing (Figure 3).
Each person receives ample feedback, and no single grade counts more than 2% in
the final evaluation. The
grading system, like the rest of the organization, is intended to be globally
robust, rather than meticulously accurate.
Someone may fail to collect a particular set of grades, but we still have
plenty of information coming in.
Pedagogically, in the era of Statistical Process Control (SPC) we want members
to learn to manage with real data. In this beginner's course with many math-shy
participants, we want to create an environment where mistakes have small
consequences.
The organization records almost all desired behavior, which The
XB Manual spells out in detail. Five
types of measures are taken: basic
participation, reading, effort, memoranda, and concept learning:
Basic participation includes attendance, a tally of each time someone
speaks in class, and a measure of use of the central computer for communicating
with other members.
Reading. Students meet in
groups outside class to discuss the readings.
After each meeting each group writes a memo describing the discussion,
which is graded.
Effort. Each department and
each person within it are evaluated twelve times on how much they have
contributed to the organization. Criteria
for these evaluations remain somewhat vague, because no one can predict where
initiative will be needed or what form it will take.
Memorandum. Each week each
member of XB writes a memorandum, recording his or her own planning, work, and
learning. Four people, taking their turns representing the organization's four
departments and using departmental criteria, evaluate and write comments on each
memo each week. Did this person set
goals? Were objectives stated
behaviorally? Were they
accomplished? Did the memo record
observations of unprogrammed events in the organization and then apply an
appropriate theory to them?
Concept learning. Twice in
the term, using criteria which have become more specific and have been
articulated earlier with each new semester, each group evaluates class members
on their mastery of the particular concepts which that group has responsibility
to teach. How many times did Tom
paraphrase someone else in class; Maria
used the concept of formalization appropriately in a memo;
Isabel met Jody outside class to make sure that she understood the stages
of group development, and so on. The
XB grading system gives people credit for many kinds of behavior which
demonstrate conceptual learning.
2) Delegation.
The class becomes a semi-autonomous work group.
As in the new paradigm in industry, members take responsibility for
production (learning) and control (grading).
Until I assign letter grades at the very end of the course, students do
all the grading.
Organization theory tells us that managers delegate to untrained
subordinates by formalizing, i.e., by giving the subordinates specific, written
directions. The XB Manual begins this process, and I specify further when
necessary, teaching students to define observable objectives and measures in the
process. I tell them exactly what
to look for, and sometimes in class I direct a group's attention to a specific
act or phenomenon. There is less
drudgery to this process than you might think.
My students may not like learning but don't mind working.
And when people are counting on them as managers to attain an objective,
they ask their peers or me for help. They
call it working; I call it learning.
XB members can look for specific features of writing or of behavior
demonstrating skills in class. They
can collect vast quantities of data. They
can measure continuously. Delegating
grading makes these things possible; no teacher could do so much.
Members (students) manage the control (grading) system.
They have the authority to change it but must first demonstrate that they
understand the control theory behind it and arrive at a consensus.
As managers throughout this complex organization refine their objectives,
the grading system has become more elaborate each semester for six years,
through 22 sections, until most recently we have what you see in Figure 3.
3) Rank-ordering.
Delegation would not work without rank-ordering.
Almost all grades consist of forced rank orders, usually with no ties
allowed.
Groups must decide how they will rank-order themselves.
Many rank non-written work through intense discussion.
Groups have spent several hours thrashing out a grade that counts .8% of
the final. Some groups pool their
individual judgments numerically. But
outsiders and procedures cannot guarantee justice; so the conscientious but meek
individual who receives an unjust rank soon learns to stand up for him or
herself.
Individuals evaluate written work, such as weekly memos, with written comments
(the comments, in turn, are evaluated) as well as ranks.
Many members experience dilemma and challenge as they rank their friends.
A member may have consistently high ranks or consistently low ranks or may rank
high one week, low the next, and in the middle on average.
Regardless, as ranks accumulate, a central tendency develops.
Grade distribution approaches a normal curve in the same way that grades
on a series of tests do in other courses. Because
there are more ranks than letter grades, the ranking system sorts students
better than most grading systems; i.e., it makes finer distinctions.
Each week ranks are reported to the Control group which makes sure that they are
put on my computer. Once a week,
each student receives a report of every rank to date, plus cumulative average,
via the college's local area network using crude-but-effective software of my
invention.
At the end of the course, we can see not only each person's rank but the
interval between that rank and the next person's. Yet, of course, the rank-order grading system produces only a
relative measure of a person's success.
Final Grades
The organization as a whole also succeeds or fails and must be measured in a
completely different way. I remind
my students repeatedly that they succeed or fail together, just as in any other
organization. Both students and the
senior manager get a definite feeling for how well people are cooperating
and how much they are learning. But
feeling seemed an inadequate measure.
In the spring of 1990 we began to measure organizational, as contrasted
to individual, performance and have encouraging results.
Members posted graphs of performance measures such as use of the computer
for communications, the number of reading group or individual memos submitted,
the percentage of people participating in class discussions, and so on.
If one had no sense of the class's relative success and simply distributed final
(letter) grades along the curve (curved grading), competition resulting from
rank order grading would become unhealthy or counter-productive.
However, in the twelve classes in which students have graded themselves
using rank ordering, competition between individuals has never become unhealthy
for a group. A few of the lower ranked students don't understand the
control system and get unnecessarily discouraged.
But even students in the bottom 20% have remained conscious of the
organization's success and have learned to compete and cooperate at the same
time, as people do in (other) real-world organizations.
With the final grades arrayed in a normal distribution, delegation of grading
responsibility from teacher to students usually ends. Acting alone but almost never unilaterally changing an
individual's position relative to others, I establish the break points and
convert the accumulated ranks to letter grades.
Benefits of Systematized, Delegated
Grading
It is difficult to evaluate this grading system because it no longer feels like
grading systems most teachers know. Some
of the benefits derive from the three characteristics:
quantity, delegation, and rank-ordering.
1) Quantity.
Students begin to take risks for small percentages of their final grade.
Seeing that no grade counts for much, that others are watching them and
exercising judgment, members begin to experiment with their behavior.
Managers are supposed to learn from their mistakes, and this grading
system provides a stable mechanism for recognizing such learning and for
reinforcing risk taking.
As managers, students and I get information about the performance of individuals
and groups in our organization and use this wealth of information to guide the
organization. Our control data go
beyond evaluation; they are
friendly, diagnostic.
2) Delegated
grading replaces quizzes, tests, and exams with measures taken from the
functioning organization: memos and
observed behavior. Verbally and in
writing, members report to, work with, and then evaluate each other.
A tremendous burden falls from the shoulders of the teacher, who no longer has
to grade. I read interesting
XB memoranda quicker than I grade dull papers, all on the same topic, in other
courses. These memos tell of the
many meetings and events which occur outside class and reveal how each person is
trying to manage. I put forceful comments on the memos because the comments
reflect my expert power, not my legitimate (grading) power.
Having to delegate the measurement of something to a student forces me to
specify what I am looking for. A
manager or teacher should state goals with verifiable criteria which do not
distort the goals; I am setting an example.
Delegating grading forces me to define my objectives in behavioral terms.
Thus, for instance, The XB Manual
asks one group to "present Bion's theory and ensure that each member can
say which Basic Assumption Group the class is in at any moment."
Students begin to overcome fear of grades.
At first they complain of the difficulty of grading: "It's
qualitative. How do
you know you're right?" I
respond (as to many queries in this course):
"You don't know. Just
do your best." Soon they take
responsibility for their own judgment calls ‑ and
become much more tolerant of other people's.
They begin to see things from the boss's or teacher's point of view.
Delegating grading helps students and teachers understand and respect each
other. Students turn to me for help
in running this system, not because they want to impress me.
I, in turn, witness students taking control over themselves and their
groups through a judicious mixture of leadership and assertive pressure (see
Figure 4). Increasingly I perceive
them as the colleagues with whom I manage this organization - each one distinct,
individual. No longer the uniform,
passive listeners of normal classes, XB members are real people.
3) Rank-Ordering.
The system polices itself. Those
who abuse the system are directly cheating other students and therefore face
peer pressure, which our students, at least, fear more than a professor's
threats. For example, one reading
discussion group which had been reporting false grades publicly apologized to
the class ‑ not to the teacher ‑ stopped the practice, and
accepted reduced letter grades at the end of the course.
Students find it easier to learn than to beat this system.
Combined with delegating, rank-ordering reduces excuses.
I hear so many excuses in normal classes that the excuse almost seems
like an art form. In the XB
organization, students must give their excuses to other students; they attempt
to impress other students, who are not as easy to fool as faculty members.
Feelings about grades impede
learning in normal, student/teacher interactions.
In my CAO, delegating grading enables me to teach.
No longer seeing the teacher as the grading authority, students seek my
expertise, not my approval.
Forced rank ordering fits a complex, developing situation, where some standards
can neither be specified beforehand nor remain unchanged, in a culture where
only what gets measured gets done. Considered
a crude measure in industry, it nevertheless fits certain organizations at
certain periods in their development, viz. XB as I manage it in my environment.
It forces the evaluator to scrutinize people's work, to make as many
fine, evaluative distinctions as there are people.
It generates criteria. Even
when I specify criteria, members continuously refine them, sometimes eliminating
forced ranking.
Because they only compare members with each other, rank- ordered grades
automatically adjust to the general intellectual level.
Members find their own, collective threshold of learning.
Members never stop complaining that it is often hard to rank one memo over
another, similar one. A misspelled
word can make the difference (as it can "out there").
Members therefore begin to pay more attention to detail, to getting it
right. They begin to do their best.
Students take responsibility for their own learning and begin to learn for
learning's sake. This claim may
surprise some readers because of the quantity of grades and their apparently
competitive nature. Many
undergraduates see themselves through the eyes of their peers.
They cannot hide from their peers and thereby from themselves whether or
how much they want to learn. Many
discover for the first time that they do want to learn. The ranking of memo rankers, for instance, began because one
person who received low ranks said, "I don't care what my rank is.
I don't learn anything from writing the memo unless the rankers put
comments on them."
Students learn to recognize and appreciate differences among themselves.
Forced to rank order everyone in the class, memo graders notice more
variety than before. As a group
fights its way through to consensus on a rank, its members express to each
other, many for the first time, what makes them different and what work they
have done. This new behavior marks
the passage from social needs to self-esteem needs described in Maslow's
hierarchy. Members go through this
rite of passage early in the course and realize, to their great satisfaction
(and mine), that they have emerged into the adult world of work relationships.
XB benefits as an organization from the esteem which becomes its
currency.
At first this grading system provokes quite a bit of conflict among students,
conflict which I am coming to value in itself.
I resorted to this rank-ordering after I first asked students to grade
each other using the normal, 100 point scale and was given all grades in the
90's. Students made no
statistically useful distinctions. No
surprises here (Gardner and Larson, 1987): students under the ordinary grading
system engaged in a low-energy conspiracy against my authority by denying me
useful grades. By contrast,
students forced to rank themselves in a group reach highenergy states in
conflict with their peers. Rank
ordering transfers the conflict over grades to the peer group.
Where I teach, students rarely put pressure on each other about academic
matters. In the XB organization,
they begin to do so. Students
become assertive with each other; they learn how to compete and cooperate at the
same time.
In short, rank-ordering recognizes, respects, and harnesses the main energy
resources in the human organization of XB:
peers, grades, and conflict. Rank-order
grading contributes more to the learning dynamism of the organization than any
other element in it.
Costs of Delegating Grading
The critical issue in control is to successfully implement the
organization's strategy without incurring administrative or
organizational inefficiencies which outweigh the gains (Geringer and Hebert, 1989). Outside
class I invest a good deal of time coaching students.
As one of the course's innovations that requires explanation, this
grading system takes somewhat more of my time than most others in use, despite
being described in great detail in the manual and being for the most part
delegated. I must make sure that
people understand their grading responsibilities and that grades are reaching my
computer via the control group.
The students put much more of their time into the mechanics of grading under
this system than they would otherwise. While
at this residential college with traditional students, I do not worry about
taking too much of their time, I do
sometimes worry that they devote to grading and other administrative matters
time that might be better spent in conceptual learning.
"Sometimes it is necessary for the control structure to evolve
over time ..." (Geringer and Hebert, 1989).
The grading system is dynamic; it must grow with the students' learning
culture, or it blocks progress. Rank-ordering,
for instance, can discourage a group of hard workers.
So we have to monitor the monitoring system and adjust it as necessary.
This grading system does not eliminate cheating or bias.
Students who have not adjusted to the responsibility and power this
organization gives them still try to get better than they deserve, at the direct
expense of their peers. They sign
on the computer and walk away, thinking their hook‑up time is measured.
Some dare to speak in class to get credit even when they have nothing to say.
They do get credit, but run the tremendous social risk of being denounced
by peers in front of the whole organization.
Bias probably distorts even more than cheating.
Social cliques on this cliquey campus can become grading cartels, even if
unconsciously. Still, most students
report that they learn about ethical business relationships in XB by having to
give a friend a low grade on a specifically defined issue.
Students with language handicaps, in our environment mostly foreign students,
sometimes do not rank as high as American students, although they integrate with
Americans socially far more than in other courses.
I have done no statistical studies but would expect to find that the
ranking system is fairer to them than the test and paper grading system.
But it is not completely fair.
Academic administrators and other faculty may perceive the OB
teacher who delegates grading as giving up control and not doing the
teacher's job. This course design,
as noted earlier, applies the new paradigm or sociotechnical design to teaching.
The senior manager plays both of the critical roles in organizational
redesign, the supervisor (Westley,
1981) and the "umbrella" or initiator (Trist, 1981).
Managers of successful projects in industry frequently find themselves
"encapsulated" or choked off by their dynamically conservative
environment (ibid). The OB
teacher who delegates grading must face outward and deal with the academic
environment, often a highly political, professional bureaucracy whose norms
prohibit claiming to teach more than another faculty member.
It takes courage to implement this design.
I tend not to
delegate the conversion of final grades into letter grades to report to the
registrar because at the end of the course hard feelings can easily ruin an
excellent group learning experience, and conflict can easily reach
counterproductive levels. This
final grading situation must be managed at three levels:
1) Many
individuals who get low grades are furious, despite abundant evidence that they
have not done as well as their peers. Regularly
dismayed at their reaction, I have tried hard to reconcile this non-managerial
behavior with my overall sense that most people have significantly matured.
Here is my explanation: The
grading system accurately measures how much an individual has adopted the
attitudes of a manager, particularly that managers accept the consequences of
their actions. Some individuals with low grades have not learned the lesson:
they do not accept the consequences of their actions and therefore permit
themselves to complain that their low grades are unjust.
2) For
the time being, it is also true that individuals do not have a precise idea of
the letter grade they can anticipate. Most
of them put long hours into the course and feel they deserve A's.
To replace the vague feeling of a division's (class's) success
(previously mentioned), next semester we will use numerical measures to try to
link the purely relative internal grades with the absolute term-end grades which
go to the registrar.
Grading sorts students by the quality of their learning and thereby certifies
the employability of graduates, to some extent. Most teachers can not change institutional grading schemes;
the categories (letter grades, pluses and minuses, or numbers) are givens; the
teacher decides. But narrowly
missing a higher letter grade can anger a student who fears for his or her
career.
Grade conversion creates unnecessary conflict in most institutions.
An anonymous reviewer of an earlier version of this article commented, "My
experience has been that the closer the grade is to the borderline that would
give the student a higher grade, the greater the argument."
The "borderline" exists because many colleges require us to
report final course grades as letters. A
teacher who uses numbers must round them off (e.g., 92 = A-).
The registrar reconverts letters to numbers (A- = 3.7, A = 4, B = 3,
etc.) and usually calculates a cumulative grade point average to one or two
decimal places. Statistically, we
are throwing away degrees of freedom, an unnecessary practice in the era of
computers. In this case, as often
in industry, better statistics could reduce conflict.
3) Conversion
of grades also causes conflict between this XB organization/course and its
environment, characterized by student ambivalence about learning, grade
inflation, great concern about grades, and a registrar's system which throws
away data and assumes that students learn as much in one course as in the next. Few other courses on campus include experience-based
learning. The environment should
also include me, for I believe that students do learn more in this course than
in others and therefore report high grades when I see fit. Some might say I have
lost my objectivity. I don't agree.
Rather, I see myself managing a new paradigm project which has succeeded
and is pushing beyond its chartered boundaries.
One short-run cost of delegating grading is immediately apparent:
people rebel. I had to force students to accept rank-order grading two
years ago. Now it is known and
accepted as part of the course. Members
contest rank-ordering until they understand that the Senior Manager won't yield.
Then conflict among peers replaces conflict with authority.
Pedagogical literature has long recognized the benefit of a degree of
conflict among peers (Johnson and Johnson, 1985); business writing is coming to
acknowledge it, too (Pascale, 1990). When
conflict becomes part of how you do things, you see how it enhances individual
learning and organizational
effectiveness. Students learn to
duke it out - with words, of course.
My Changed Perspective
The following experiences illustrate what students have learned and how my
perspective has been changed by delegating grading using rank-orders.
My students and I presented the system to other faculty members where I
teach. Later I presented it to
colleagues at the 1990 Organizational Behavior Teaching Conference.
In both cases, groups of six discussed a topic and then
rank‑ordered themselves on their contribution to the discussion.
In the first case, some of our faculty gave it the college try, but
students expressed keen disappointment with several who, out of kindness, let
the students in their group get high ranks.
Experience had taught the students the benefits of honesty in this
exercise; some faculty, in the students' view, don't know what a work
relationship is.
At the OBTC, two of three groups were unable to arrive at a rank order.
Avoidance took many forms, which participants acknowledged but could not
overcome. Some expressed anger at me, anger which I used to face
from students at the beginning of the
course. I do not give in to
students in my course and felt like a pariah at the OBTC.
My OBTC colleagues were dismayed at both the idea and the experience of rank
ordering. Many questioned so much
emphasis on competition, when modern management stresses cooperation.
But veterans of the real CAO do not complain of too much competition.
Student/members perceive rank-ordering more in terms of authority:
with this tool they can take much of grading from the hands of the
established authority and make it work for themselves.
I now think of myself not as a teacher of Organizational Behavior but as the
manager of XB, a new paradigm classroom organization which produces managers.
As a manager I have learned to value control without coveting it and have
developed rank-ordering as a way to delegate it.
Like other managers of new paradigm organizations,
I contend with my environment: a
college grading system which forces me to assign final grades.
Up to the end of the course, XB student-members responsibly manage a
complex, fair grading system. I
want to help them finish the job.
References
Smith, J. (1990). On Grades, Apples
and Peat Moss. UCLA Magazine, Winter, p. 17.
Fuchsberg, G. (1990, June 6) Business Schools Get Bad Grades.
Wall Street Journal.
Gardner, W. L., & Larson, L. L., (1987)
Practicing Management in the Classroom: Experience IS the Best Teacher. OBTR, XII (3), pp. 12 ‑ 23.
Geringer, J. M., & Hebert L. (1989).
Strategic Control in East‑West Joint Ven-tures.
Paper given at The First International Conference on Recent Develop-ments
in East‑West Joint Ventures, SUNY ‑Plattsburgh, October 19‑20,
p. 11.
Glasser, W., M.D. (1986). Control
Theory in the Classroom. NYC: Harper & Row.
David W. Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (1985), Classroom Conflict: Controversy
Versus Debate. American
Educational Research Journal, 22, (2), pp. 237 - 56.
----- (1975). Learning Together and Alone. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice‑Hall.
Porter, L. W., & McKibbin, L. E. (1988). Management
Education and Development. New
York: McGraw‑Hill.
Pascale, R. T. (1990). Managing on the
Edge: How the Smartest Companies
Use Conflict to Stay Ahead. New York: Simon and Shuster.
Putzel, R. (1990). XB: A Learning Organization. Unpublished
Manuscript.
Trist, E. (1981) The
Evolution of Socio‑Technical Systems.
Occasional Paper # 2 Toronto: Ontario
Ministry of Labour Quality of Working Life Centre (35)
Waterman, R. H., Jr. (1987) The
Renewal Factor: How the best get
and keep a competitive edge. NYC: Bantam.
Westley, W. A. (1981)
The Role of the Supervisor.
Publication of Labour Canada,Ottawa.
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