We were all asked initially how we were feeling about the micro-teaching session on the morning of February 5th, the online platform Teams popped up with question and 20+ people sheepishly typed ‘nervous’ into the box as the word swelled, surrounded by other options such as; excited, nervous, anxious.
I, myself, had typed ‘eek‘, not necessarily nervous but definitely apprehensive and I think that could be tied in with doing something out of my comfort zone and the natural feelings that are attached to that. We were put into groups of 6 (tutor Carys included) and asked who would like to go first, I didn’t mind and felt I should lay way for those who had heightened preferences, the slot I was given was 4th, so second last and designed to be first after our break.
It was initially tricky to engage as a participant as I felt a bit distracted worrying about my own delivery, but the micro-teaching sessions were really engaging I quickly forgot about my own. The only thing that dawned on me was timings, and I had initially planned a ‘rough guideline’ but online delivery really benefits from specific timing constraints so I would need to be regimented with that.
My time was up, and I began – discussing the concept of typology and how it relates to OBL, and showed the two examples I had chosen, James Reynolds’ ‘Last Suppers’ and Zed Nelson’s ‘The Family’ – I quickly moved on to the ‘physical’ part of the exercise, I had given the participants prior warning (which was lated noted could be triggering to those less able, so I would likely rephrase or explain further in future). The treasure hunt exercise went well, they felt keen and eager and enjoyed the fact that we weren’t staring at a screen or in a more formal ‘lecture’, I explained that I had designed my micro-teaching session like an icebreaker, which I think helped manage expectations. I often feel like when in the online teaching space, we are acutely aware of concentration levels dipping and distraction is overall higher so there isn’t enough room for exploration physically, but I know it does come with certain restrictions that are hard to anticipate. They found the items I asked them to quickly (quicker than I had expected and allocated time wise) and were also keen to share why they had chosen those items. From a robot key ring from a girlfriend, to an emergency lemon for gin and tonics and a mash up of leftovers from last night’s dinner, each singular object told their own little story of it’s owner. The exercise had been scaffolded to get broader (from a set of keys to some food to an object of importance to you) and therefore more personal to the individual, I was wary of forcing participants to share too much, but in this instance everyone felt able to which worked well. I think the timing of the exercise allowed at the end for each participant to share their object of importance which I think became a really vital part of the session as a whole. With two minutes remaining I shared the dictionary definition of the word: quotidian, ordinary or everyday; mundane: his story is an achingly human one, mired in quotidian details and thanked everyone for participating. We took a moment of reflection, and I couldn’t help but think about how I could’ve ended it differently, more succinctly and tying it back in with the initial idea of ‘typology’ – either visually with a conclusive slide or verbally.
The feedback was both written and verbal, we had opted at the beginning to go down the route of ‘two stars and a wish’, and almost all the feedback mirrored one another, they loved the active element, and thought it was well suited to an icebreaker, they noted that it was well paced (which I appreciated as I feel I have a tendency to rush and talks LOADS) and my favourite bit of feedback was that ‘they loved that we were making a sort of artwork with the activity’ which was exactly what I had wanted it to feel like. The feedback also reenforced my own observations regarding the ending, I think I had got too tied up in not running over time and definitely could’ve taken the last two minutes to reiterate the exercises’ relationship to typology, instead I fear I left the ending feeling loose and maybe they would be wondering why did we just do this? I would’ve in an ideal world, been able to take these objects they’d grabbed in the exercise and quickly made an online artwork (could’ve been done via Padlet – utilised a lot by the other participants in their sessions) but i think that would’ve required a lot more time.
In the verbal feedback we discussed how the micro-teaching session icebreaker design worked well, but that when presented to the shyer, younger students they would on a whole be a lot less likely to share their chosen objects and reasoning, so would present challenges, all things you have to consider, particular in the virtual learning world. Thinking about it, and moving forward with the idea, I think it could really work, using the padlet too, and maybe incorporating using ‘grids’ on the camera app on smart phones – especially if it was a full session, and we could create a typology where all the objects were photographed similarly and uploaded, I have attempted to do this below, but obviously very restricted by the fact the participants had to hold up their keys, and I only could use screenshot which is not what I would want the end result to look like.