yesterday’s our first Clinic session for primary school CL teachers (TRAISI: 12541). we have a total of 16 participants (13 prior signup; 2 walk-ins; 1 sit in). the largest class size we’ve experienced is 10 prior to this. 6 more participants may possibly change many things, especially the discourse dynamics (are the participants able to interact well? are posts/threads from 16 an overwhelming number? how many of them will be proactive contributors, and thus influencing the answers to the previous 2 qns?)
on the whole WJ is steady, and facilitated the session well for a first-timer. no doubt some teachers appeared hesitant on the “outcomes” of the workshop, we managed to close the first session with full participation in the first introductory post （帖子A）, as evident in the df.
after looking at WJ’s reflection, i begin to have a deeper appreciation of ‘struggles’ she’s experiencing as a facilitator of such dynamic/fluid workshop that’s set to achieve broad outcomes (cf. lesson objectives). coupled with an audience that may be so familiar (and fixated) with SIOs, it’s not an easy session to facilitate.
on my part, i am also thinking of what i should do more, in terms of handholding future facilitator who would like to try out our blended learning approach.
things that i have done for/with WJ:
1. sharing of past workshop resources
2. reviewing and planning of activities (incl. schedule, instructions in handout)
2. logistical assistance (online: including setting up of coursespace wiki & df, ironing out of course publisher, setting up of fb groups; classroom: furniture arrangement, electrical wirings)
one single thing that stood out which i felt strongly i could have done more:
– to do a recap of the set of slides, and clarify the meaning and the link between slides starting from 缘起 part. i did not take this step as i safely assumed that these ideas would have been clear to WJ as she has sat in two previous sessions. a good reminder for me to rethink how to make my presentation clearer the next time in a single round. i felt it is important to make them see (or at least let them relate to some past experience) on the usefulness of pure f2f workshops, regardless of length. then we follow to sell why our experimental approach may work better.
– my failure to do this also affected the explanation of the 2-part design (Clinic-Studio). making a clearer emphasis of the design, and how the two are related yet focused differently, may also help to allay the doubts of some participants on the ‘takeaways’.
教学相长 as we often say. in the process, may we both improve on our facilitation skills. that’s all for now, “more later!” (Wu, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015) (：
(acknowledgement: photo by LoggaWiggler)
It is not failure ..but it is the nature of learning. haha.
hmm I think for myself, and most learner i believe, there is a gap between knowing it as a student-knowing it as a learner-knowing it as a teacher.
I was the student in the two previous two courses and have some rough idea of the design. The studio part though is still vauge and i think it will become clearer with the first round of studio clicked off.
I was a learner in understanding the design.
When my role changes to a teacher, it becomes more challenging as I need to have a very clearer idea of the direction we are heading to and more importantly a clear idea of the paradigm shift, from resource-driven to learning driven, from quick intro and quick fix to foundation building and co-construction of understanding. The dynamic of the class, as you mentioned, is unpredictable and thus teacher needs to be extremely the learning experience he is orchestrating or facilitating for students. 🙂
Overall it is interesting experience and I like the postiveness of some of them who, despite the ambiguity, believe that it will be good learning experience.
haha. cheers to uncertainty in learning 😉
and more later lol.
perhaps ‘failure’ was a strong word and too conveniently used. it essentially meant not carrying it out, based on the assumption laid out (:
studio is going to be another big unknown indeed. but we’ll figure it out, one way or another. “因为没有对错，只有好，和更好” (Tan, 2014) 😛