What new discoveries have you found within this unit –
reflect upon your practice and experiences within unfamiliar or ambiguous
scenarios?
Something that has been a challenge and completely new
experience for me is delivering a workshop and being a teacher for a short
period of time. I now realise that the amount of work that goes into planning a
lesson or a day for people is over whelming as there are so many different
aspects you have to think about, including potential allergies, to time
management and having back up plans if anything goes wrong. As an example, when
we were delivering our workshop, there was a boy disrupting our day slightly;
we had met him previously and it was apparent he was quite naughty and
disruptive. He was lingering around the doors and trying to disturb us, so at
first, we just shut the door and tried to get on with the task in front of us.
He did it a second time and Susan, the woman who was in the class with us all
day, quickly told him to leave and not disturb us again. As it was not our job
to tell him off or discipline him, we did not feel we could have done much more,
but we were pleased with the way we handled it. Susan seemed pleased as well;
she saw we had previously tried to keep him out and kept her away from the
issue the first time round. This allowed her to bring more authority in on the
second occasion, to add weight to what we had previously said, and this worked
very well. This is something I would definitely take away from this experience
and feel we handled it in the right way considering it was such an unfamiliar
scenario.
Another thing I found extremely hard was completely changing
the workshop, going from mark making and colour to just colour and taking away
the mark making idea. We had made the workshop quiet complicated with too much
going on so our tutors recommended that we take that out and just focus on the
colour side and speak more about emotions and semiotics. This was a very
unfamiliar situation for a lot of us including me as it wasn’t something I had encountered
before, I think this was due to lack of organisation and commitment on some
parts. It certainly worked to our advantage though learning a lot and seeing
how a negative situation could work to our advantage and in the end be a
somehow positive position.
What did you learn and discover? How has this informed
your practice and wider understanding?
Time management is key for workshops, especially with
younger children. From the time that we started on the Tuesday, actually
delivering what we had planned to a tee was a little overwhelming. At first, we
were all extremely worried that we were going to run out of things to do with
them as our workshop included a lot of different small activities along with a
couple of more time consuming ones. If we had ran out of things to do,
everything would have got a bit hectic with us running around attempting to
occupy twelve pupils. So the fact that we had back up activities and we planned
the timetable minute by minute certainly helped with the success of the day.
This is definitely something I will take away with any presentations or workshops
I may do in the future. Being organised is key to being a success in anything
that anyone does in life and doing this workshop and planning it so thoroughly
has helped me immensely with this. As the saying goes “Fail to plan, plan to
fail”.
Reflect upon your engagement with each aspect of the unit
– from primary research to workshop activities, tutorial groups, collaborative
work and contextual understanding. Did you commit to each appropriately and
contribute well? What aspects do you consider that you developed? What could
you improve upon, and how might you achieve this?
I believe my involvement in this procedure has been more
than adequate; I have organised meetings with my group, attended all other
meetings such as tutorials with our tutors and have contributed good ideas
which were adopted. I ran and controlled my own tasks in the workshop, which
the pupils completed successfully, and I also led a successful microteaching
workshop.
In the tutorials many things were discussed, for instance,
what our plans for this workshop were, did we have any questions we needed to
ask and how far have we come since any of the previous meetings. During this
time, I engaged with the group and tutor and tried to give my opinions on subjects
that were brought up and involved myself as much as I could. Especially at the
tutorial after the dry run, I tried to take as much advice as I could from that
to help us with the planning. Even though we thought these comment were quite
negative, it gave us the drive we needed.
My commitment in this unit has been the best so far during
my time at university; I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience, which made me
so much more eager to be at every meeting and to include myself in everything
that went on throughout. As I have taken quite a high role in this group, I
feel I could develop my leadership skills a little bit more, becoming more of a
leader with other things in the future and taking a bit more control with what
I do. I do think as a group, we could improve on our communication skills, as
there has been some problems with this along the way. There is no one to blame
but we have all at times not communicated sufficiently, and I personally will
try and improve upon this.
Reflect upon your choices, from material, to process and
research. Were they conducted at the right time and to the appropriate depth
and level of interrogation needed to fully inform your idea development?
Even though we had frequent group meetings and discussed
different aspects on each occasion, at our dry run it was all over the place
and unprepared. The artist research was covered and other parts, but other than
that, things weren’t ready that were supposed to be on that day, which meant
that our run through was a disaster which resulted in us being told we had to
turn it around in less than twenty four hours otherwise we weren’t able to
deliver the workshop at all. Even though we all knew what we wanted to do and
vaguely knew how the day was going to go, it was not set in stone, nor were we
unorganised, which gave us room to manoeuvre. After this, we did turn it around
and we were able to complete the workshop, which proved to be extremely
successful. We looked into different parts like the Holi festival and art direction
on our PowerPoint and gave them a bit of information about it, then led an
activity followed by a discussion. By the end, the pupils knew the learning
outcome and knew what we were trying to teach them.
What learning did you achieve? What could you improve on?
Identify an aspect that you could develop further in line with your practice.
Until the dry run through I don’t think everyone in our
group realised that we needed to plan this to the last detail and minute. I
believe that it was the main opinion of the group that we could just ‘wing it’
which we all realised very quickly was definitely not the case. As we did the
dry run through, I could see people panicking as we all came to the realisation
that winging it was definitely not something we could get away with. Another
thing I learnt was that working in such a big group with different courses was
a struggle as everyone had different interests. At different points, this did
work to our advantage as the graphic designers did the PowerPoint and the girl
doing fine art looked into artist research but we did have some conflict of
opinions. Another thing I would say I have learnt and will take away from this
experience, is that when you’re working in a group, you can’t always rely on
people to pull their weight and that different aspects of the unit is
completely out of your control. If the task they have been individually given
isn’t done, then they bring the whole group down. Therefore, I think if I were
to do this again I would make sure we met a lot more as a group and we all knew
that everyone was doing their bit. People failing to come to meetings would then
jeopardise their involvement.
Based upon your choices made within the unit (workshop,
theme, process) identify and select the key motivations within this unit.
Evaluate how these relate and have informed your practice and future ambitions.
In this unit, my key motivations have been to deliver the
workshop and to ensure the children understand the learning outcomes; I have
thoroughly enjoyed planning and delivering it to the year sevens. It was a
massive challenge for me as I am not used to working in a group but that was
one of the main reasons I chose this option; to put myself into an unfamiliar environment
and to hopefully learn a lot from it. As it stands, I have learnt a great deal
about not only myself but also how to organise and deliver a workshop or
lesson. I have learnt that even though it is mainly common sense, being
organised is something that is key for a successful workshop for any age but
especially a young age group. I had to make the choices I made to achieve my
end goal of making the children understand and enjoy what we, as a group, were
doing with them. This is what I identified as my end goal and this is what
motivated me to make the choices that I did.
This experience has affected me and definitely changed the
way I will operate in the future, such as, effective and detailed planning,
good gathering of information, delegation within a team, good leadership of
that team and using superior colleagues to help discipline as and when is
necessary to maintain the concentration of a class as a whole.
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