Interaction, take two

Our micro-teach today went rather well. I think the class enjoyed the activity.

The point, of course, was for the drawing exercise to be difficult; for nobody to do it perfectly. It spoke well, I think, that the only group who did it perfectly-- well, they cheated.

I think, when speaking with the "teachers" and "students" at the beginning, I should have emphasized more that making mistakes was really the purpose of the activity. Because I did feel bad, later on, making groups who had come up with pretty inaccurate drawings stand up in front of the class and explain their mistakes. But once again, the point of the activity was to create breakdowns in communication so that they could be analyzed. This should have been emphasized more.

It was also apparent that my instructions weren't explicit enough-- neither the "teacher" nor the "student" should have seen one another's paper, but one "teacher" kept glancing over at her "student"'s paper. And I certainly don't believe she was intentionally cheating.

The concluding discussion was very open-ended. We would have done well to stop it earlier, and give the class more time to explicitly talk about our teaching strategies, our strengths and weaknesses. The class got lots of feedback on the activity that they did, but my teaching-partner and I got very little feedback on our role in conducting the class.