I did the bad blogging thing, I dropped off for several weeks and am now diving back in with the hopes that my few gentle readers will forgive me and again read my posts.
Interestingly enough, my last post talked about how I was thinking about starting my next instruction project with a colleague and between then and now, we not only taught one workshop but are gearing up for our second on Monday!
The first workshop we taught was on RefWorks, a bibliographic management tool. We ended up following through on simultaneously editing a Google doc, each creating our own specific outline, and then practicing once before the workshop together. Of course we each prepared on our own, but knowing that we worked well together, the one practice together was enough. And the workshop went well! It was a program we were both fairly familiar with so we were able to get smoothly through the tech parts and trade off well. Another great part of practicing, at least, was working with my colleagues. We were able to provide ample and productive feed back to one another both during the practice session and after the workshop which was helpful. It was also helpful that we are both very able to take constructive criticism so that we could help each other improve.
Monday is our next teaching session, this time on instructing Microsoft Word for Dissertation. This program is quite a bit more complicated and there are always things that can go wrong with not a lot of explanation. Because the first session went so well, we decided to use the same planning method as last time. EXCEPT, we practiced more. We have had different levels of feedback during each session - all of which have been very helpful in thinking about our session on Monday. It's been very useful to have the different levels of feedback; by levels I mean our levels of preparation paired with different levels of novice/experts.
During our first practice session, an expert in instruction and Word for Diss helped us through and showed us how she generally teaches the workshop (effectively). It was so useful to have this during our first run through because we inevitably forgot content or needed refreshers on the "why" we do this or that. During our final practice session, we had observers who were less knowledgeable about the program (though still experts compared to the workshop constituents) and who were not experienced in instruction. Their feedback on the content specifically was very helpful.
This planning workshops thing is getting easier, but no matter how experienced I get, I'll always remember the planning process, and even more importantly as I move forward, the evaluations.
Getting evaluations from the first workshop (which only had a few people) was very exciting because no matter how we thought we did, if our participants didn't learn something, our workshop was less successful. In the future, after I have more of the workshop content and know-how down, I think it would be interesting to re-look at the evaluations and see if there are questions I'd like to incorporate or take out. All comes in time, but this instruction thing is pretty interesting.
Oh, and happy summer!
