This week we presented our one-shot workshops in class. I was pretty excited about the other workshops my group was presenting, and there were others in other groups that looked really interesting that I wish I could've gone to as well. Since (as with the book club) there's inconsistent overlap between my group of workshops and my blogging cohort, I'm going to make some more general observations about the workshop experience, both as a presenter and as a participant, instead of focusing on individual content of workshops.
As a presenter, the biggest thing that surprised me was how well we managed the time we had. Because there's no way to really practice group activities, we were pretty worried about things taking longer than we had planned and eating up our 20 minutes. As it happened, the time flowed pretty well and some things didn't take as long as we anticipated, while others took a little longer and used up that time. Generally, I think this aspect of our workshop went well. Another thing I realized was that you can't do group discussion very well when you've given a group hardly any time to learn about and process the new concept you went to discuss. We had two discussion periods in our workshop, and the one that followed a portion where the participants were more engaged in and had more time to learn about the content we were discussing went much better. This should be obvious, but I'm not sure it was something we really anticipated per se while we were planning.
I had a lot of thoughts about the other workshops, and obviously I thought some went better than others. One thing about workshops that run well is that they 1) have an intense focus on each individual topic (or sub-topic) discussed, and 2) keep things moving. A lot of short, different activities that each have a clear goal is going to be more successful than a couple big, broad, fuzzy things, it seems.
Another thing that I noticed is how much the content of your workshop influences the way you conduct it. There were a couple of presentations where I initially thought, "This is really uninteresting." Then I reflected on how I would teach the same content in a more interesting way, and I wasn't really sure. So I decided that was content I probably wouldn't have tried to present at all. But it was useful and interesting information. Finding a way to really engage people in something that's important but not necessarily the easiest to teach or demonstrate takes a lot of work, and obviously some people did a better job of this than others.
I had kind of similar thoughts to you regarding how interesting certain workshops were versus others. I felt like part of that was interactivity versus a lack of interactivity, but then in my own workshop, I realized how hard it is to balance that interactivity and hands-on engagement with the presenters actually imparting new information. You want to give people enough information up front so they can try it on their own or have a group discussion, but it's hard not to bore people while trying to give them that initial information.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that was pretty much exactly how I felt too. Getting people to actually do something interactive when you have a lot of content to present and only 20 minutes for everything is really tough.
DeleteI definitely learned from these workshops that it's important to have a handle on your audience's capabilities and keep in mind the amount of activity versus lecture you'd like to happen (as a participant or a leader).
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