Teaching Implementation 2: focus on classroom/frontal teaching – Professional Teacher training
Overview
1.10.2019: How does the vocational teacher tutor and guide groups (teams)? How does the vocational teacher tutor and guide individuals?
I was inspired from our tutor’s comments. He said to experiment with the teaching practice. I took the chance and I asked my group if we can just do the workshop. With the workshop we will be able to guide the group and individuals to some sort of learning. My group accepted my idea to do a workshop based tutoring. I started to make a workshop design and shared it with the group on an online document. Long story short with the help of the group’s input I managed to make a workshop design. We had few online meetings among the group members and asked each other if someone needs help in delivering this workshop. One member did not understand this time and he just gave a presentation by just reading the workshop design. He was suppose to do a workshop. I was paired with the member so, after he was finished with the presentation I started all over again and then we spent some time in actually doing the workshop followed by discussions. I stopped when the listeners had stated their learning and shared their reflections. So, no harm done. 🙂 Let’s just quickly see what was the workshop and the process of doing it.
Workshop Design
We will do a small workshop to help our audience understand one way of tutoring and guiding both individuals and groups. This exercise is to find out How creativity and idea generation works?
In order to do a workshop we needed to give them a task. To do a task we needed to have a topic.
Topic:
Paper Clip exercise
Description of a Topic and Task
We will give the audience 10 minutes to write down the 100 ways they can use paper clips.
This exercise is used to understand how ideas work. Which ideas to work on and which ideas to discard.
At first they worked individually.
After 10 minutes they shared their uses of paper clips one by one.
Note: we gave them 10 minutes because at first they will have many ideas but the ideas will quickly finish and then they will have to think hard to come up with more ideas. So, to give them time to think we gave them 10 minutes. Later we discussed about this during discussions.
When the first person shared his/her uses of paper clips the other listened and cross out the common uses from his/her own lists.
Once everyone has shared their uses we asked them to think if they can come up with more ideas.
After listening to the replies we asked them to write a reflection by answering one question.
How can I apply what I learned in other situations?
We gave them 3-5 minutes to write a reflection.
Then the discussion started.
Then we facilitated the discussion.
We asked the questions about similarities of their ideas. We asked them what are the reasons that everyone have very similar ideas. We asked them what they do once they run out of ideas (this is the stage where if someone keep on thinking new, creative and unique ideas will appear)
Note: In order to be creative and come up with unique ideas we need to think deeply and more creatively. New ideas only appear once we have written down the common or similar ideas. Once the ideas that are similar are written down on paper only then our brains starts to think deeply and more creatively. This is the time when new ideas appear in our minds. And when we talk about our ideas with others even more new ideas appear. This is called building upon ideas.
These new ideas that we have built with the help of others are the ideas that are more creative, useful and unique. The whole process is called idea generation or ideation. Through this ideation we will be able to tutor or guide these individuals and groups on the importance of creativity and ideation.
The individuals will learn that they have very similar ideas and their ideas and creativity only increase once they share their ideas and listen to each other.
As said above the presentation went well in my opinion as we managed to get an answer to the question that we asked through our workshop and the audience members we able to come up with one learning each. They were also asked to tell us where in the future they are going to use their learning. Which, obviously they answered.
Other groups
The groups are teaching about implementation phase 2 as well. The other two groups had some interesting topics:
- (Bastu) What are group (or team) dynamics and what collaborative methods or practises can be used in teaching?
- (Team Owl) How can the vocational classroom teaching methods promote individual learning process and personalised learning paths?
Team owl got me thinking about the differences in individualised and personalised learning. At first when I saw these words i did not think that these words will have so much differences and meanings. It is like they are opposite to each other. The discussion was interested and I could easily relate it to what I was doing. Team Bastu just presented about group dynamics. This is also my phd related topic. SO obviously I will be very interested in it. I had a chance to talk and I guess I was most of the time in this session talking. This presentation as well as exercises that i did just validated my phd topic and studies. I also found some useful sources. Overall, This session and the previous session was very helpful for me to learn about implementation of teaching.
Reflection
Group Work
Our group work is improving. We are getting to know each other and giving team members time to adjust and start working efficiently. Not every one participated in group work due to travel issues but they informed us. This time as I made the workshop design and one member added some very useful tips he rest of the members had it easy this time. So what did I learn? I learned that I will not accept a simple statement to a question. I asked did you understand what you have to do? and I goth the reply from one member that yes i understand. He did not understand it at all. I will be more careful in accepting answers from a group members. I will make sure that they really understand the topic and execution of it in the future.
Teaching
Today I wanted it to be a facilitation. I prepared with my group a workshop. So that other members work and discuss and I just navigate the discussion by asking questions. This did not happen the way I wanted. First my team member did not understand what workshop style is. Which to some extent is my fault. I should have actually done a practice sessions with this individual. Only thing is he said with so much confidence that he knows what to do so I accepted it. Not next time. Secondly, There were only two listeners. So, the planned discussion of 10 minutes was reduced too few minutes and less active. I wanted more. So, in the future I will not worry about it as I was worried and i lost my focus a bit. I will always try to keep on improving myself.