Sarah Jones' Diary

Week three
Felt like shit. Have cold. Weather appalling and had to go to Eval. course tonight on bus in pouring rain as car had flat battery. Not a promising start but surprisingly good evening.

Weird night. Chatted to Magda in coffee bar before we started. Why is she so Goddamed enthusiastic about every thing?

Different tempo tonight – got straight into it. First thing we were asked to do was try and identify how we would teach students to do simple practical task. Easier for me than most because making tagliatelle carbonara definitely more practical than conjugating irregular German verbs in the future tense.

Eventually came up with a model that everyone was OK with. Then Jen said she was going to teach us all to do a practical task, following our model. Happy days! The task looked like some sort of trick with except it wasn’t. All we had to do was copy her moving some coins around. She showed us the moves then we had a go. Looked really easy – only it was bloody impossible. She actually stood right in front of me, showed me several times AND I COULDN’T DO IT. The only good thing was that no-one else could either. Excruciatingly embarrassing ten minutes. We only had to remember three moves of these damn coins but it just never happened. Was so clear and easy in the demo but cannot believe how you can watch someone showing you something so simple and nano seconds later it’s all gone.

I must have tried this a hundred times and I just couldn’t do it. Am I really this stupid? Why am I on this course? I can’t even copy something that primary school kids could probably do standing on their heads. Thank God no-one else could either. Aaagh!

Then the more Jen tried to help, the worse I was. She was really good at coming round and watching us and showing us all over again but despite her best efforts I was getting worse. She must have thought we were really thick.

Anyway, I think she eventually got frustrated because she stopped the exercise and we started talking about it. We were all asked how we felt. Was grateful to Ludger because he was worse than I was and he said he felt really stupid. I figured I had nothing to lose so I said I felt stupid as well. Even brain of Romania Magda found it hard, although she eventually got it. (But she got her come-upance because she was the first to crack it but then Jen asked her to do it again in reverse and she couldn’t – so much for transferable bloody learning!

Best bit was when Dirk said he could do it and then when Jen asked him to show her, he couldn’t do it! Hee Hee! Serves him right. You can watch the video of it. Bet some of them are really embarassed. 

So we all talked about the awfulness of it all but then, bit of a bombshell….Jen asked us whether we thought our students ever felt like that. Must admit that I suddenly remembered the dozy student last year who never learned to chop garlic – omigod – supposing he felt like that! (Given that garlic chopping is a bit of a prerequisite for almost anything and the easiest thing in the world to do…)

Loadsa stuff came out of the debriefing session – can’t be bothered to write it all down – just watch the vid. But better record the Very Important Learning Point before I forget.

A lot of kids in school feel stupid and confused and frustrated every day of their lives and carry those feelings and memories of education with them into their lives as adult ed students. This will affect their perceptions of learning and the way they evaluate their learning and our teaching (for example, many will be too afraid to say they have not learned something).

Jen said the next time we had a student who couldn’t do something to try and recall how we felt when we had those coins in front of us!

She asked whether she could have made it a better learning experience for us so we talked about stuff like if you are doing a demonstration, where you stand in relation to the students is important. (If they are getting a mirror image it makes it really difficult.) She was also talking too fast and demonstrating too fast etc etc. so all in all a pretty lousy piece of teaching really. So then she asked

“Well why didn’t you tell me?”

She said even tho’ we all thought with hindsight that she had been an awful teacher, at the time we all said we felt failures - no one had said we feel fine but you are rubbish.

Just as an aside, she mentioned something from Transactional Analysis (I’ve heard of that). There was this book by Thomas Harris called 'I’m OK, you're OK'. She drew 4 squares; I’m OK -You’re OK; I’m OK - You’re Not OK; You’re OK – I’m Not OK; You’re Not OK – I’m Not OK stuff). We talked about these positions and had to think what positions we had been in during the exercise and could we think of examples when we were in the other boxes.

Very Important Learning Point coming up…..

If students are to be involved in evaluating their learning it is most effective if both students and teacher are in the we-are-both-ok box!

Then the next thing she asked us to talk about was what she, as a teacher, had been doing when we had been trying to do the exercise ourselves. As far as I remembered she had just been wandering around checking on how we were doing - like any other teacher, saying the usual stuff

“You weren’t paying attention!”
“I’ll show you once more…”
“Watch carefully this time”
“It’s really easy”
“I’ve shown you three times already!”

So we had to discuss how this made us feel. Was it helpful? Well no, not really but I figured teachers say this to reassure students. Then Ludger said being told it was easy made him feel even more stupid and not reassured at all. Then Jen said that what was going on here was not about reassuring the students but about reassuring the teacher – like it made teachers feel better - creating an I’m OK (teacher), You’re not OK (student) relationship.

Will write this down as another V.I.L.P….

Students almost always take responsibility for failing on themselves. They feel they have a problem, not the teacher. Teachers often say things that reinforce or compound that sense of failure but make the teacher feel better because it is passes the responsibility firmly back to the learner. This will affect their perceptions and therefore evaluation of a course.

There were also a load of other small things I noticed like…..

• 
  
• Just because you can do something once it doesn’t mean you can do it for ever – or even a second time (but that’s worse because you feel even more stupid)
• If you can do something one way around doesn’t mean to say you can do it backwards or the other way around! (cos it looks different?)

The debriefing made some good points but most all of us still wanted to be able to succeed at doing the exercise with the coins!

Jen asked us to think what had gone wrong for us and what sort of help we would have liked. I thought written instructions would help, someone else wanted a diagram, someone wanted to be talked through it slowly. So we were given a choice of support materials – there was even a mathematical formula one for Dirk!

She said you need to prepare different sorts of support material so that students can choose what suits them best (sounds like a whole lot of work to me…) but another VILP I suppose.

If students are going to be involved in the evaluation process they need to be able to identify how they personally learn, what sort of help they need, what learning processes work for them and how to ask for this help. If they can do this their contribution to the evaluation process will be more articulate and insightful

After that we stopped and went for coffee. Talked to Magda and was v.relieved when she said she felt stupid about the coins as well.

Then we went back for a short session afterwards. Will talk about that tomorrow, Too tired now. Zzzzzzz