Discussion with a Colleague


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 has 20 to 25 students. It would be easier to present the final products from worship activities. However, it is also not very manageable to work on one activity if there are 25 students in one group, is I think there should be another round of grouping in each big group. At the end there should be another 4 or 5 small groups in each big group so that eventually 4 or 5 students would actually work together on their activities. My biggest concern about this process is since there are so many students, the grouping process may be chaotic and consume too much time.

This concern leads to my second question, which is about time management. I have around one hour in total to finish this workshop, and students are supposed to have time to group themselves, work on their activities, present their products and also discuss about their reflection. Each of these processes will consume quite a lot of time since there are so many students, so I have to think about how should I manage time without wasting too much time on unproductive activities.

The third concern which requires the most brainstorming is the content of workshops. What specific activities students would be interested and will be willing to do? How am I going to design activities that are related to the main topic of each workshop? There are also some practical questions related to activities like how am I going to involve all students to one activity or what kind of results would be practical to make with in half an hour.

The last part is about myself as a facilitator. Although I used to teacher and I worked in educational field before, I had never have such a big group of students, and I am a little bit worried about my ability to handle so many students. Plus facilitating a workshop requires a lot of skills such as public speaking skills and also language proficiency, etc. Trying to explain everything short and clearly to students and make them understand what I mean can be a challenge as well, because there are so many students and I’m sure there will be questions about my instructions after I speak, so making my words concise and strong would be my goal.

Those are my concerns about my work for placement so far, I will try to figure out some possible solutions regarding to those next week.




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