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Reflection for workshop 6                                        

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Reflection for workshop 6                                        

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Ebony and Ivory - Group Presentations

What a learning day today was. The real flipped classroom, where the students took over the teaching and we could all learn from each other.

Although challenging I enjoyed this type of alternative assessment. I felt the digital artifacts was an interesting way to present information and knowledge. It was interesting we were also asked to do a 500 word write up. Perhaps there isn't complete trust in this alternative method just yet to show understanding? Do we use alternative methods, but then go back to those we are familiar with to support this?

Self assessment and peer assessment was an interesting way to engage with the presentations. I find often in group presentations everyone is worried about their own presentations and often don't listen. Having to mark our peers and others helped focus the audience and really demonstrated different ways to assess.

As someone who is slightly dyslexic the amount of reading was a challenge. I would suggest for next time maybe we get the groups learning outcomes before hand to read and make notes, and we can use this during the assessment. It was a lot of reading to do, and I feel perhaps my marking suffered due to this.

Overall I learned so much from my peers, and I enjoyed presenting our work to them. I have learned a lot about group work, and its importance and challenges and will keep this in mind next time I use group work with my students.

I'm excited about the individual projects and their potential. Getting the feedback from our peers and tutors was a great way to reflect on our learning and see ways to improve.

An enjoyable process, and in the end a memorable product. Exactly what assessment should encourage.

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Reflection for workshop 5                                         It's ALIVE!

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Reflection for workshop 5                                         It's ALIVE!

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Time Management

The workload of working full time and doing this course is finally catching up with me. I had a new cohort start last week, and I'm teaching two new subjects and with group work on top of this, I'm finding it all a bit of a challenge. I use to wait until the last minute to finish something, but now the anxiety that doing that causes, is too much. I liked to be organised and planned and working in a group I realise I am not in control and am struggling to do my part, not let my group down, as well as facilitating learning for my new students. I want them to start off the course enthusiastic, and the energy that this requires is overwhelming. It's funny I'm teaching a study skills module at the moment and I myself am not applying the strategies I am teaching about. Practise what you preach. It's time to manage my time.  This session helped me feel more confident in what I was doing for our group presentation, now It's time to get it done in time for editing and feedback from my peers.

My Tech is a wreck

I had no clue how clueless I was with things that are technical. Thank god I have a group that has skills above my skill level. I really would have liked to spend this session learning a little more about those different digital options we were shown, and how to use them however this workshop was more about working on our project as a group. We decided to use a medium one group member already had experience in to make it easier. Again i think time and other pressures limited our opportunity to explore in more depth. But i'm thankful my group has talents beyond my own. This is the reason I enjoy group work because you are able to draw from other skill sets then your own. When groups work well each person can contribute in a way that helps showcase all talents.

Thank god for examples

What I did enjoy about this session is the samples of different artefacts. I felt this helped clarify what we were expected to do and showcased different ways of doing it. I think examples help calm students nerves before attempting something new. We discourage examples in Montessori classrooms as we feel it limits creativity as children think the sample is the "right" way of doing something and often just copy it, rather then having an original idea. I found for us it just gave me reassurance of what we were suppose to do, and outlined different ways of doing so. I wonder if somehow these samples will limit our creativity though?

Feed-attack

My group and I were quite discouraged by the formative feedback we received on our learning agreement. We felt we had finally cracked what was expected when we wrote our draft, and to receive constructive criticism was challenging because we felt we hadn't achieved this. This made me feel for my students when at times I have tried to use formative feedback to guide them, but perhaps it could have discouraged them. It is so easy to focus on the negatives rather then the positives, and now in retrospect after this session we found the feedback very helpful in guiding our assignment in a better direction, but the important thing is to read, comprehend, digest, and understand that formative feedback is to help us understand before it is too late.

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Reflection for workshop 3 Learning agreements and group work. 

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Reflection for workshop 3 Learning agreements and group work. 

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THE BIG PICTURE
Florence brought up that the way we assess should really affect the way we shape our teaching, or the other way around which brought up -
"Constructive alignment is a principle used for devising teaching and learning activities, and assessment tasks, that directly address the intended learning outcomes (ILOs) in a way not typically achieved in traditional lectures, tutorial classes and examinations (Biggs and Tang, 2011)."  ( Shamefully admit definition is from Wikipedia. Bad student not going directly to the source- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_alignment)
This made me think a lot about how often we teach to the assessment rather then focusing on the learning itself. Now that I'm conscious of it how do I constructively align? Can I shake things up and still have a job? :)

The flipped
This part of the session helped me consolidate my understanding of feedback, but it seems everyone had read different parts of the DTLE, which was good revision and highlighted areas I wanted to look into more. I agree the energy was a bit down but I enjoyed discussing Angharad's critique situation. I loved the idea of post-it notes and am going to try something similar in one of my peer feedback groups.

The group
I found a group and I'm excited about our topic, alternative assessment. The presentation part seems short, and negotiating and working out the logistics of group work will be a challenge but I'm looking forward to learning and working with others.

Peer Feedback
This was a challenging part of the workshop as it was hard to feedback on just a draft. I have been looking at peer feedback in my teaching recently and have been exploring different models such as the RISE model which I am enjoying using with my students. Maybe once our ideas are more formulated, it will be easier to provide constructive feedback to our peers.

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Refection for Workshop 2  Fight for your Right 

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Refection for Workshop 2  Fight for your Right 

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Flipped classroom, having to come to class prepared and ready to learn. Brilliant. Something I expect of my students, but often they don’t do. I really enjoyed the podcast; it made me re-think my approach to assessment and my students. Assessment is about building relationships, empowering the students, a balance of labour and compassion.  The discussion of the University Assessment Framework also mentions this in the way it specifically states in its principals, ASSESSMENT SHOULD SUPPORT STUDENT LEARNING.  How often do we do this as we tear our hair out and are angry at the students for not reading the guidelines or understanding the learning objectives? How are we empowering them to take charge of their own learning if we demand our way of looking at assessment?

Now this course has gotten me excited about something I have never been excited about before.. Assessment!

In FSL I could not relate to any of the positive songs that students had chosen to explain the way they felt about assessment. Perhaps now I am changing my mind.

I really enjoyed our group case study discussions as I realised everyone was in the same boat. We all struggle with similar issues, despite our disciplines. Something that really struck me is we also all wanted students to succeed. We did our best to understand challenges, modify, change and re-evaluate our practises. It was us against the system, now how do we fight the system? How do we change educational practises that have been in place for ages? How do we start a revolution, one assessment at a time?

My new assessment song, except replace ‘party’ for ‘reassess assessment’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBShN8qT4lk

I have been inspired about what I want to do for my individual project, a look at peer and self-assessment. As for my group project I realised as an introvert how terrified I am of doing group work.  Now I can relate to my students. I am excited however about assessment, have I mentioned that yet? I look forward to finding a group and learning more from their experiences and understanding of how to support student learning.