Follow up 1: Feedback and reflection
Background
Getting your own and others’ feedback, and reflecting on it, is critical to improvement and change. It is also essential to the basic cycle of design through iteration.
Ideally this is best done immediately after the workshop (sometimes, it’s even better during).
What you need
Resources:
Paper, pens
People:
- Your teaching team
- The employer
- (if possible) A student representative
Time: 20-30 minutes
Method
Have an open feedback session to gather feedback, opinions and thoughts from all stakeholders in the workshop.
Start the session by outlining why you are doing this – to make it better – and that all comments are needed to do this. Confirm that you believe what you teach and put that into practice!
Avoid disagreeing with any point of view (Even if you think it, don’t say it).
Ask questions rather than discuss or argue
Make lots of notes – even better is if you all do it.
Divide the session up (with and without students and/or employer)
Always end with your own feedback – say whatever you need to say to make the workshop better next time
Take a break.
Example:
SCAN FROM NOTEBOOK; LIST OF CHANGES
Case: The first time we ran a workshop in Yucatan a number of things went wrong. We had a very tiring and difficult feedback session that listed many issues. At points, it felt like we had really failed.
But writing these all out was very rewarding, since it gave us something to work on. It meant we could do something about it. We took a break and worked on the 3 big issues: timings, teacher interaction, and activity instructions. We changed the material, reworked the timings and changed teacher interaction and facilitation by creating an instruction sheet.
Each of the changes made the workshop better – in fact, it completely changed the way it worked and resulted in a positive outcome in the very next workshop. It still wasn’t perfect but we continued to iterative and gradually the changes got smaller and smaller until we had something that worked well for the context and setup.
Associated teacher activity:
Run a feedback and reflection session with your peers based on the material in this course. Hold an open discussion session about how effective you think the material has been. Consider:
- What worked well? What could be improved (and how)?
- Finally, what changes would you make if you had unlimited resources?