This post is retrospective from 14th March before the micro-teaching sessions
I’m prepping my micro-teaching session for Monday. I’m trying to find ice-breakers that are creative and will relate to my session but haven’t found anything yet that I feel confident enough in running for the first time. With the session only being 20mins long, I don’t want to have an activity that I’ve never used before and therefore can’t estimate how long it will take.
Referring to my teaching practice – In general I’m finding that students are happier with their screens off during group-sessions. It can be daunting trying to encourage them to be visible. For my technical teaching online sessions, this isn’t too much of a problem but I would really like it if I could get more rapport going so that students can contribute if they would like to and feel more ownership. I’ve had some success with asking specific students to show pieces of work that they are currently working on. This has prompted some great conversations and also has meant valuable feedback for the student on how their work is perceived by their peers.
The issue with making this an effective strategy for every lecture is that the group sessions are advertised across several pathways to students I’m not familiar with so I don’t know their work well enough to tie in with the particular technique I’m profiling. Also students are frequently watching the recordings of sessions in their own time. This is due to clashes with other time-tabled lectures etc.
I’ve been asked by BA Sculpture students this week to set up a forum for them to be able to chat about their work, to get more of a community going in lockdown. Also they would like to have more group-contact going into the summer, especially 1st and 2nd yr students. I’m thinking about the best way to encourage them to own this space, to enthuse them to get involved whilst being led by their requirements. I’ve suggested Gather Town as a potential platform: https://gather.town/ Its possible to embed films, PowerPoints and lots of other resources into this. Its versatile, Its fun, and its free currently.
I’m going to suggest that they each bring along an image of something they are working on and perhaps an example of a piece of art that really doesn’t appeal to them to prompt a discussion around taste and choices of subject matter in their own practice.
Whilst hunting for ice-breaker activities, I’ve seen a good site which suggests doing an origami design with your eyes closed. I am thinking to have origami as my micro-teaching focus object, specifically a design of a boat. Origami is already pretty tough going – its difficult to establish how to fold a piece of paper in half without then going into more complex folds. It would be a bit risky as I’ve no idea how to run this online or exactly how to relate it to what I had in mind – also I don’t know how long it will take.
I was thinking of asking people to make an origami boat because its initially very simple but with a twist: you have to virtually wreck your model for the last stage, by turning it inside out and it feels all kinds of wrong. By pushing a material to do an apparently contrary thing, participants are confronted by not trusting themselves to do it correctly because it does feel like you’re breaking the boat, and they don’t trust the facilitator, they think they’re being given the instruction incorrectly. You are asked to ‘squash-fold’ the paper and that goes against the grain when the rest of the design is so much about precision and conventional folding. I’ve delivered this to people who can get quite angry, you can hear the irritation in their voices!
Everyone ends up in the same place – its how you get there that counts as that’s where the learning is and I want to tie this in with Mumford and Honey. With origami, to begin with, there’s not much room for manoeuvre. My thought is to discuss learning styles whilst going through a real-time demonstration, asking people if they are aware of their own style. I would also ask them to think about when they last learned something and how they learned it and hopefully to get a discussion going. Most people have made paper aeroplanes or ‘chatter-boxes’ at some point so that could be a good starter question.
Hi Sara! I was really interested with your thoughts around icebreaker activities – I often try to factor these into sessions with my students, but it can be a challenge finding the right one that is fun, not too much of a slog, that won’t take too long and get a meaningful message in there too!
I actually recently did one in a client workshop that worked quite well, it went like this… A couple of days prior to the session we asked participants to: “Choose something that is personal to you that you rely on every day (not a phone!) to show & share at the start of the workshop, you could show the actual object or an image of the object.” It is actually quite a tricky one, but very accessible when working from home.
We got the clients to hold up their object to the camera as they talked about it, we took a screen grab and added it to the Miro board we were working on live within the session. We also added virtual post-it notes next to the image with some key words they had mentioned during their description.
It worked out brilliantly as we didn’t know the clients that well, and it was a lovely way to discover something about them though the objects they selected. It didn’t take that long, there were 10 of us in the workshop in total and I think it took about 15-mins.
The embedded message here was relevant to the client’s product, a MedTech device; so, something that was very personal to the user/patient and, due to the medical nature of it, they did actually rely on every day. We wanted the client to think about the emotional meaning that potential patients/users would assign to their device beyond the obvious functional benefits.
I’m just looking into what would be the right lecture/workshop to incorporate this icebreaker with my students (BA Product Design) to reinforce the key messages… possibly one around inclusive design.
HI Sarita, How kind of you to send that idea. It really does sound good on lots of levels and I’ll definitely try it. I love the idea of adding the photos to Miro, something I’ve not tried out yet. My tutor Vicki Hill also suggested it. There’s a lot to be gained from unpacking familiar objects and our perceptions of them seen through the eyes of others. I’ve used handling objects at The Maritime Museum to help visitors to relate to pieces in their collection. I did a series of workshops once about ‘Drake’s Coconut Cup’ which looks like some amazing bronze goblet but is actually a coconut (The name’s a bit of a giveaway!) and one of the first ones to be seen on these shores, so a coconut then was a status symbol as a rare and valuable item. The original is carved with intricate battle scenes and has a solid silver tiny verions of Drake’s ship ‘The Golden Hind’ on top. It also has a silver dragon around the bottom because ‘The Dragon’ was what the Spanish called Drake, a play on Draco – Spanish for dragon. Drake was basically a pirate and plagued the Spanish, raiding and wrecking their ships for gold (which they had stolen from Indiginous Mexicans). I made a template so that participants could put together a basic ‘coconut’ out of card and then they made status symbol-inspired images/sculptures to decorate these. This was with young adults and their version of a status symbol included air-max trainers, mini mobile phones, Ipads, cars, etc to go on top of their coconuts.
Anyway, this is probably not that useful for you! Can’t imagine that you’re going to get your participants to make cardboard coconuts anytime soon. Here’s a link to the image: https://live.staticflickr.com/7341/9702276711_f6041c77a8_n.jpg
I loved that idea of making a virtual picnic with people adding their favourite foods to it as a way of having a collaborative event. I’ve also used the film-describing game a couple of times where you ask people to draw their favourite film in pictures and show it, so that people have to guess what it is. And here’s a link to some other suggestions which I’m going to have a look through at some point =
https://symondsresearch.com/icebreakers-for-online-teaching/