Monday, June 28, 2010
Worksheets vs. Whiteboards
We have worksheets with instructions for drawing diagrams explaining what you did after acting out an ET scenario. This step, which Hunter first introduced in his Yakima workshop and which I then stole for my Maine workshop, seems to be a very important step in helping participants process and make sense of their ET experience. In my Maine workshop, I also gave participants whiteboards and explicitly told them to draw the diagram together on the whiteboard FIRST, and then draw it on their individual worksheets. This seemed extremely effective for getting the participants to work together and engage in a collective consensus process for the creation of diagrams. What I saw today was that there were whiteboards on the tables, but participants were not explicitly told to use them for this section (they were at other times), so they all just worked individually on their worksheets. This was really boring to watch as a researcher, but more importantly, it seemed much less engaging for the participants. In the future, I definitely recommend explicitly telling participants to use the whiteboards first.
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I mentioned the observations and recommendations from this post in the instructors' meeting this afternoon, and Lezlie pointed out that one reason for having them work individually is to make sure that each individual does the intellectual work of figuring out the diagram. She said that often when they do it individually, different people at the same table come up with diagrams that are inconsistent, and then they have to struggle to reconcile them. This is a good point that I had not considered. However, I added that if this is the goal, it is important to make sure that after they are done with their individual diagrams, that they discuss them and then come up with a consensus diagram on the whiteboard.
ReplyDeleteI also heard from the instructors that they've been doing a ton of these worksheets, and they seem to be getting bored with them.