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The Last Workshop

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This week I had my last workshop with my students. I feel it end up very well and now I have very positive feelings about the whole class and all the workshops. I have created a website for students to give feedback about my workshop. For the first two workshop I did not receive much feedback , but this time two hours before the last class , I checked the website and there are a lot of positive feedback , which made me feel so encouraged. There are also some students posting their doubts about the workshop , which is very thoughtful for me. Here is the link for the feedback website: https://padlet.com/278254557/workshop This time I co-facilitate the workshop with Kelly. We have spent a lot of time before the workshop to prepare and she is very supportive of my ideas , which made the whole preparing process very smooth. In the workshop we cooperated very well and after the workshop we even did a small reflection together. We both think in general the workshop went well par...
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My Second Workshop

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Last week I finished my second workshop and here are some reflections about this workshop. This workshop is very different from the first one as we have changed the classroom. The space is smaller compared to our first classroom , but interestingly there were also less students attending this lesson this time , so it still worked well. There are 60 students in total attending the workshop and I feel most of them have enjoyed our activities. More people are willing to share their feelings this time as we have spent more time together and students get to know each other more. I also feel that I have gain more trust from the students , but sadly I have only one workshop left. This time I invited two of my colleagues to co-facilitate activities with me. I noticed that how different we behave in front of students and that also resulted in different reactions from students. One of my colleague is very good at improving the atmosphere. For example , at first students are a bit sl...
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Summary of What I Have Done in the Last Two Weeks

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In the last two weeks I have made quite a lot of progress for my placement , and I have spend around 20 hours working for this in total. I have had meetings with three groups of my colleagues respectively again to discuss details about each workshop. So far we have designed almost everything except the format of the print-outs. I spent the most time with Mely , who is helping me facilitating the first workshop , discussing the plan for the first workshop , as the first workshop is the most urgent one. I feel I have learned a lot from her. She is a very experienced and helpful person. I have to say knowing that she would be there gives me a lot more courage to work on this. While we designing this workshop , she always listens to my opinion first and emphasizes that she is a helper but I should be the leading role as it is mainly my placement. I feel this attitude decreased the disadvantage of group work because we don ’ t have conflicts at all when we make decisions , but at...
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Working with Three Groups

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This week I have spent approximately 14 hours in total in doing my placement. It is a very busy week for me , especially in terms of doing placement , I feel I have finished most creative part of my work and that ’ s also the hardest part because this part gives me direction so that I can keep working on the practical details later. Generally speaking I have come up with the main outlines for all the three workshops this week with the help of my brilliant and kind colleagues. I spent one hour searching for materials and organizing ideas before each workshop discussion , and I spent six hours discussing those ideas and designing the process with three different groups of people for three workshops , so for each group we have a two-hour discussion. After the discussion for each workshop I spent one hour writing the workshop plan so that we keep a track on what we have already done , plus it ’ s easier to keep working on the details later. Besides the twelve hours that I used on...
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Possible Solutions to My Concerns

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Here are some of possible solutions that I come up with after discussing with some of my colleagues. First of all , I need to have a clear idea about the space that we are going to use , so that I can decide how am I going to group students. I went to the assigned classroom but it ’ s locked , so I tried to find a picture of the room from university website , as follows: Besides , in order to get more ideas about workshop activities , I started steal ideas from my current lessons , every time when I noticed some new activities and different ways to involve students in a class , I would take notes about that activity and thinking if I can use it. Also , I talked with a few colleagues about the workshop and they have provided many interesting ideas for me. I will write them down at the end of this article. I was also hoping to find some extra help for facilitating the workshops , so I asked a few colleagues if they are interested in helping facilitating t...
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Discussion with a Colleague

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In the last few days , I kept thinking about tasks for my placement and I had a few concerns about it. Since there are so many aspects to be taken into consideration , I somehow was stuck at the beginning process of designing workshops. As a result , I decided to discuss about my placement with a colleague and try to figure out a direction. I spend three hours talking with my classmate Dania from IMAESC program about this topic , and it turns out talking with others and collecting ideas is a very effective method to organize my thoughts. Now I ’ m going to write down all my concerns about potential challenges that I ’ m going to meet in this placement. My first concern is about grouping students. Since there are around 100 students , which is a very big group , it can be very difficult to group them in a proper way so that everyone get the best from their group. I ’ m thinking it would be better to group these 100 students into 4 or 5 small groups so that each group...
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Reading about Intercultural Communication in Workplace

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I started reading the materials about intercultural communication today. I decided to accumulate knowledge about terms and concepts as much as possible since it is the topic of my first workshop. I read the second chapter of Exploring Intercultural Communication written by Zhu Hua ( 2014 ), who is a distinguished Chinese professor of applied linguistics and communication. In this chapter , she mainly illustrated the different communication patterns in Chinese and British contents in terms of meetings , small talks and humor in workplace.  She has provided many interesting perspectives about intercultural communication as she has experience in both Chinese and British cultures. For example , she pointed out that compared to British communicational environment , Chinese model is more influenced by the concept of ‘ power ’, which put leaders and subordinates in a hierarchy and stopped deep communication between them. This is somehow a little paradoxical , because the orie...
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