Some personal reflections on co-moderating.

I must admit that I approached my rôle as moderator for this topic with a degree of trepidation. My co-moderator and I did not meet or plan anything before the first meeting. I, certainly, was unsure whether preparation was expected, and left it for experience/seniority to initiate anything beyond actually making a point of watching the course videos and reading the two papers. Given our group’s tendency to rambling discussions that seem to end up somewhere, it seemed inappropriate in the interests of equity to plan to control the discussion or predetermine its direction.

That said, I had observed that a couple of our group members had been known to go the entire of an hour meeting without adding a single contribution: to have everyone’s voice contribute something to each meeting was the only certain goal I had for my moderating rôle.

So my co-moderator and I winged it – at first. After the first session, she suggested that we had a follow-up chat. I was very happy that she did this as it allowed us to connect more closely and throw some possible ideas of where the next session would go, and identify goals that would help focus the group discussion. We were, however, careful to only sketch outlines of possibilities leaving the development of the sessions, and even more the choice of presentation format, for the synchronous meeting. For the first time, we used breakout rooms in a PBL group meeting as a means of strengthening connections between group members and allow more in depth discussion of issues of personal interest.

As I have mentioned in several synchronous sessions, the ONL course relies heavily on participants’ maturity as learners. Usually this is associated with the lack of direction and taking responsibility for contributing to the PBL group’s work without significant prompting. In this topic, it also required judging when to let one person take centre stage (despite an intention that everyone should contribute in synchronous sessions), and then interrupt quite forcefully. But, even more than judging the appropriateness of the interruption, being able to interrupt in such a way relied heavily on the maturity of the person interrupted and them interpreting it as a practical – or at least pragmatic – necessity and not as an attempt to sideline their concerns, or, in popular parlance to ‘de-platform’ or ‘cancel’ them. Indeed, the concerns raised were, or rather are, such as require thought to respond to helpfully, and have also had a significant impact on our presentation.

Initiating a practice of providing a short summary of each meeting immediately afterwards came from my experience in the previous topic of missing sessions and never watching the recordings. Indeed, while the meetings are still recorded, I wonder whether these summaries are actually not only a potentially much quicker means of catching up with a missed meeting, but provide a more tactful way of sharing discussions that got rather heated or personal, by allowing the key points and concerns in different areas to be summarised coherently. It seems possible that this format can also help diffuse any tension that may have arisen, and facilitate progress, meaning making and inclusion since areas of agreement, disagreement and conflicting concerns should be the most clearly remembered points, at least in the short term.

I can only hope the other members of the PBL group have appreciated the summaries: from the point of view of co-moderator, writing them helped me consider the scope of the following session.

I can also only hope that my ‘attendance’ at the last of the topic’s sessions in the form of leaving far too many comments on the slides being prepared for sharing was not too much of a distraction. A long power cut and limited data are most inconvenient and I am really grateful for my co-moderator for taking on full responsibility for the session despite her own less-than-optimal situation of being on a train (and in the quiet coach) for much of the meeting. Somehow, though, we managed: perhaps by dint of ‘good communication’ – that is, situation updates c. 20 minutes before the meeting is due to start! I strongly suspect that success was greatly aided by the maturity of all group members and their ability and willingness to manage without an assigned moderator if necessary!