4  Semester 1 Week 7

4.1 Discussing the bullet point intros, participant recruitment, reducing perfectionism

In this session, we go through everyone’s bullet point intros. These are usually between half a page and a full page of A4, and don’t need to be concrete.

We’ll then cover participant recruitment. If we have time, we’ll look at reducing perfectionism and discuss this as a group. If the bullet point intros take longer than expected, I’ll pass the resources on to the students to review outside the session.

4.1.1 Expected progress

  • Around now, I would expect most ethics applications to be submitted (or in the final stages of draft) (especially if it’s going through College)
  • Students will have made a rough outline of their introduction and will have done background reading
  • I will usually ask students to pick a deadline for their Introduction around now, adding it to the shared deadlines spreadsheet

4.1.2 Bullet point introductions

  • We then spend most of the session discussing the bullet point introductions.
    • Each person talks about their project and what they currently think about for their introduction in terms of structure
    • To help students engage rather than defaulting to silence, I sometimes give each listener something specific to focus on (e.g. one person listens for the gap, another for structure, another for flow), rather than just asking “any questions?”
    • I ask students to jot down a line or two on each presentation, even if they don’t ask something aloud, so the presenter has more than just what was said in the room to reflect on afterward
    • I will then give some feedback on these and students can also ask questions etc. For the first presentation, I try to model what I’m listening for out loud, so the group has a sense of what to listen for with the rest
    • It’s quite a good opportunity for the whole group to understand what everyone is doing for their project

4.1.3 Participant recruitment

  • If we have time, I will cover participant recruitment first, then reducing perfectionism
    • It’s important that students’ recruitment plans match what is going through ethics - do they?
    • Do they have a target number in mind, and is it grounded in something (e.g. a power calculation, or previous research for qualitative work), rather than just “as many as I can get”?
    • What are students’ plans for recruitment?
    • Do they foresee any difficulties? If so, is there anything we can put in place now to mitigate these?
    • Things to think about:
      • When do participants need to be secured by, to leave enough time for data collection, analysis, and writing afterward? Students often underestimate how long recruitment itself takes
      • What are the backup plans? What if the students need to recruit more people?
      • Are any gatekeepers needed?

4.1.4 Reducing perfectionism

  • I talk about perfectionism and how it can be quite a big barrier in terms of not wanting to ‘let go’ of things
    • Remind students that a draft is just that: a draft. It’s not the final version and doesn’t need to be seen by anyone else.
    • Sometimes what looks like wanting to polish something further is really about not wanting to show unfinished work to someone else. It’s worth talking about this openly (I’ve experienced this myself), as a student who’s worried about being judged needs something different from one who’s genuinely trying to perfect every single sentence.
  • I talk about my own experiences of it as a student and what I found helped me:
    • Breaking things into small chunks
    • Reminding myself that feedback will help make it stronger in the end
    • I remind students that a published paper is the end result of several rounds of revision and editing they never see. Comparing an early draft to that finished version isn’t a fair comparison, and no one, including the paper’s authors, got it right first time. Again, I have many examples from my own work I can discuss!
    • Students have a finite amount of time - if they spend ages perfecting one section (e.g. the intro), this is time not spent on other sections that also need to be strong (e.g. the discussion). Sometimes, we see Discussions that are rushed, and it’s often because the focus has been imbalanced between the sections.
  • I tend to add the below external resources to Teams for students to engage with if they want

4.2 External resources

Dr Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel found these resources on Perfection Paralysis on the Hidden Curriclum website (contains lots of useful resources)