Lost in translation

My new quest:

To encourage my students to be independent thinkers and have the confidence to explore and experiment.

Something that I’m aware I need to work on is my ability or inability to communicate what I want. The problem is that I want to give the learners a lot of scope within projects and offer the freedom to explore. I want their outcomes to exceed my examples or go beyond the language I use.

During my training year I was very reluctant to provide teacher exemplars as I was worried I would be directing the students down one avenue, but actually found that providing no avenues often led to ‘a rabbit in the headlights’ situation where students struggled generating any ideas. Now I tend to offer my own exemplar and have a discussion about possible avenues supported my Pinterest or other students’ work. This means that the members of the class who still require that structure have a clear picture, whereas the more explorative members have stimulation.

Often during a project, I would seek out different approaches and highlight them for the rest of the class to see. I would like to think that my positive responses give the students the confidence to try new things.

The problem I’ve faced this project is using words to label things, but then having different expectations.

Basically I wanted the students to ‘present’ a design era in a static form:

-I wanted them to cover specific topics

-I wanted that static form to draw attention.

That was my criteria.

I decided to call it a poster (as to not be to ambiguous), which in retrospect was a mistake. I didn’t necessarily want a poster, but thought it was a safe start. Then my intention was to build them into other ideas of displaying and presenting. I asked them:

Have I said that the poster has to be a certain size?

Have a said that it has to rectangular?

Have a said that it has to be made with paper?

Have a said that it has to be flat?

I think for some students, this was quite obscure and I've ended up with heaps of posters.... This is where I am at right now. Hopefully, next time I write, I would have a discovered a method that scaffolds learners into exploring and experimenting.

#Teaching