Educational Origami

My time in Mumbai has been frantic. Over Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I ran 12 one and half hour long sessions on the ITGS syllabus and assessments. It was intensive, demanding and immensely beneficial.

I frequently refer to Dale’s learning cone in my presentations and consider it as I teach, but this workshop reinforced the accuracy of this research. The best way to learn something and retain it is to teach it. My level of understanding of the ITGS course has improved dramatically. This experience has been, on a professional level hugely beneficial.

One of the expectations set for me as a workshop leader was to model appropriate teaching techniques within my workshop. This is a dilemma in many ways as with any course of fixed and limited duration (we only had 18 hours), and a vast volume of content we had to cover, the first port of call for conveying this information is “The lecture”. I have to be honest, for some of the sessions it was a chalk and talk approach. But I tried to build into each session interactive elements, often collaborative to reinforce concepts and processes, to illustrate and elluminate, I tried to model teaching techniques I had used successfully with my ITGS students to stimulate the delegates. Providing different styles of media, varying tasks from butcher paper to wikis and wordle, providing video stimulus material and engaging in delegate presentations and reviews marking examination and assessment material to writing specimen questions and publishing these on the wiki. These thing help to provide variation for me and to engage those learners.

18 hours seems like a huge amount of time at first glance. It seemed to me as I approached and prepared for the workshop to be a lifetime, but the reality is that it is too short a period of time if you are going to engage in more than just lecture style, chalk and talk teaching. If you want you participants/delegates/students to learn by: doing, demonstrating, or by teaching; if you want them to participate, engage, consider, question, practice, experiment, attempt, reflect, evaluate, debate, argue, disagree, critique, support and contribute then 18 hours is too short a timeframe.

One challenge is to pick what is essential and to deliver it in a mode that maximises it value for the participants. I was provided with access to my participants via email for weeks prior to the workshop and I was able to get from them an indication of what they wanted from their learning experience. This combined with the goals and objectives of the workshop made the job easier. My role was easier still by the commitment of the participants who works happily through out the 3 days.

The second challenge is to not sit back and just recycle the materials I have when I next come to present a workshop, to learn from my experiences and to change and modify my approaches as a result. But this is how we should approach teaching too. It is not acceptable to develop a course of work, or a unit of learning and deliver it verbatim year in year out. Our teaching practice and our curricula should be living things changing, adapting, maturing and evolving.