John Heintz talks about his work on the project 1

Let's talk first about the context

The Faculty of Architecture at Delft, the bachelors programme, so this is a first year course, students coming out of a highschool, preparation for university with the science background.
They have had a design semester with very little knowledge input, and then the second semester is a knowledge semester and so they do what we refer to as line courses but basically they are courses intended to transmit knowledge rather than design skill, and the course is building process management.
You see in architecture schools the emphasis is always on the design and what you might call the art aspect of architecture, and so the whole acculturation process, i.e. issues such as the programme or the brief, the compliance with building code, making the client happy, ergonomics, structure, all of these technical issues, is seriously downplayed.

You would like your students to become more interested in the process of it all. That is more or less the general problem?

Well, the emphasis on "design" encourages students to adopt a kind of myth of the architect as a creative genius, as a solo practitioner, as the sole creative force behind the building -

A romantic image.

- which is a very romantic vision of the architect and which is one which is utterly and totally inaccurate with respect to practice. The purpose of our course is to introduce the students to kind of the other side of that, exactly what is being denied which is the rational, considered, reflective approach to managing or guiding or steering or directing design within the context of the entire building process.

So we want them to first understand what the entire building process is, who are involved in the building process, and we want them to understand how the role of the architect fits into that, and what their multiple responsibities are.

It is important to notice there is a kind of tension, not only because we would like to attract students to our masters programme in competition with architecture, and the architecture department basically runs the bachelor programme, but in terms of this acculturation process which is the windmill at which we're tilting.

Yes, right. They need to create a broader mindset and not just concentrate on the design thing.

Then there's an institutional tension. If you read the guide to learning goals for the three technical universities, attitude formation is reserved oddly enough for the masters when, in my point of view, it is too late. And skills development is primarily in the bachelors when it's too boring, in the sense that if you've got no reason to develop the skill, it is very difficult to do so. Many people find it difficult to develop skills they don't understand or require the use of.

Let's elaborate a little more on the concrete goal for the project?

My goal is to develop in the students an appreciation of the building process in its totality, to develop in the students an appreciation of the way certain kinds of management knowledge or skills or simply an understanding of how to run or organize or direct things, can facilitate – can help the architect or anyone else in the process to understand that it's collaboration and that, even though there are tensions between the collaborators that buildings don’t get to be at all without a degree of collaboration. And to develop in them a basic familiarity with the building process so that they understand how it’s typically phased, what kinds of things happen, what the building processes are like, what the client will have done before they talk to the architect so that is basically very basic knowledge.

How were you going to assess the student work in this new set up?

The old exam had a problem but this was made worse in that students would have a go at the exam without studying, evidently. They scored very very poorly. I was always having to move the 'ceasuur', as they call it here, down. I set myself the rule that half the class should pass and usually I had to move the ceasuur down from the standard in order to achieve that. And students would take the exam several times and still fail. The exam questions were really very close to the text. But it's not effective and in discussion with students from later years, they seemed to retain very little of it. During the course that we were required to take as instructors,I was indoctrinated in the notion of active learning and I thought well this may really be a good idea. Hypothetically, I could get them to do a case study. Of course I couldn't really do that because the class size was then effectively 250 and is now effectively 400-450. So there was no way that I was going to grade 250 reports. It was was a non-starter.

And that's where peer assessment comes in.

Peer assessment exactly. Blend-XL offered me the opportunity for what I thought would be quite interesting which would be that students grade work. And the reason I thought it would be quite interesting is because we set writing tasks to students very often, but they very rarely read what they write and so they very rarely come to understand what it is to write a report addressed to somebody, and write it in a way that somebody else might profit from it. And I thought what better way to train students to be aware of that and maybe to respond to these issues, and by getting to do that, to grade each other's work. And Blend-XL offered the support for attempting to develop and implement a peer assessment scheme with which at that point I had had no experience and which would clearly be a logistic issue.

(to be continued)