Reflection on micro teaching session.

This session was incredibly useful to take part in as I have not delivered much online teaching, due to my role being face to face. In the online session I forgot to include a couple of the things/habits I do in physical teaching, that enhance students learning and aids me in teaching, including asking about previous experience and knowledge. This will help me in enhancing the experience in future. When preparing my session I found it difficult to think of a session that would be good in an online session. Initially I thought I would prefer if the session was in person, but I think that it being online got me thinking about more things.

I was a little apprehensive and nervous to start the session as I wasn’t sure if my session would transfer well online and have the desired learning. I also worried that without having physical tasks in the session it might be harder for the participants to fully understand the session and what I was teaching them. This nervousness also was due to having different academics observing my session, which I had never had before. 

In hindsight I think it would have been fun for the participants to have some physical plates and tools with them so that they could understand the session on another level. Is there a way I could have sent out materials or get participants to have a bit more of a DIY version at home? They could collect things in their home that could replicate those in the workshop. Would this need more risk assessments? All these are ideas I could try in future and could help deepen understanding.

The response and feedback from participants was really great, constructive and gave me a confidence boost with teaching online. There were a few instances where I could not see the chat for responses as I was sharing my screen. I should have specified how I wanted participants to feed back to me so that I could hear all of them. 

Katherine mentioned a connection between printmaking and zines in her micro teaching session. This connection of history of printmaking and zine making as a way of disseminating knowledge, stories etc was a nice way of developing my session and connecting it to hers. This made me think about a connection between these two sessions. Could printmaking technician and illustration lecturer create a joint session of printmaking and creating zines?

In Kim’s session I really enjoyed her open approach to character building, putting no pressure on what you were creating and allowing the participants to have full creative freedom in simple ways. The history of character creation and development she gave was really interesting and also contained lots of useful links for people to continue research with. I would like to try and see how I could take her approach in future in a session in the accessibility of creation and information. 

In future, I would definitely have more citation within the presentation with ways of participants being able to do further research in future. The artwork examples I used throughout the session were examples from the workshop, but it would have been really helpful for people to see inclusive and diverse narratives within printmaking. I agree that I could have paused in more moments. This worked really effectively in Khaver’s presentation and I think giving people a bit more time to digest, make notes and think would be really effective in participants learning and absorbing ideas. I think I went faster as I was nervous and first to go.