Provoked by the start of the PgCert, and a limitation in the form of a lack of material provided to me in advance by a senior lecturer, I improvised and developed a special activity for my seminar group this week. The activity aimed to push their reflection and communication skills, critical thinking and confidence – whilst also making them notice specific things about the film and unpick films in a constructive way. I aimed to give the students freedom within boundaries I had set up in the form of questions around which they could ground their thinking.
The questions themselves were provoked by my previous experience of teaching film at Royal Holloway, University of London where we watched a short documentary together every week as a group and the student responses were short and surface level, centering around “like” or “dislike”. I wanted to bring to the traditional film course some of my art and design background which relies heavily on the “crit”; containing reflection, critical thinking and constructive criticism. The students see the questions before the film, note them down and choose a question to focus on whilst watching the film. After the film they get into pairs and discuss their responses to the film in relation to their question, eventually sharing their individual discussions with the whole group.
Whilst the students responded to the questions (in pairs) by presenting their answers and thinking to the whole group – I noted down/typed the students’ responses into a live google document whilst projecting this document for the whole seminar to see. This simple action held the students accountable for their words, gave them confidence that their opinion mattered and also generated a resource they could reflect back on. The blended model and documenting approach to the questions (projecting me typing their reflections live) was provoked by our PgCert session last week on ‘Peer Observation’. We had the opportunity to read a complete OB2 form written by an observer reflecting on a seminar which took place online. I had never seen an observation form/report before and it suddenly made peer observation feel both exciting and daunting and so real – the session was immediately lodged in my mind. Below I’ve quoted the section of the report that had an impact on me and provoked my thinking of how to take my film questions and discussions one step further.
“OB2 Tutor/Peer Observation Report
Example observation of Collaborate seminar (1 hr, 15 students)”
“There’s an obvious difference in how we might respond to student contributions in online text chat, and in a physical classroom, and how (and whether) we then engage with that response, because of expectations, norms, intuition, or whatever. It is much easier to gloss or pass over an online text response without attending or responding to it than it is do we might do an oral contribution in a physical classroom. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it lowers the risk threshold for the contributing student, but it illuminates the question of what we are doing when we let a particular comment pass. What do you think?”
“In this session you’re primarily asking for two modes of engagement from the students; 1) listen to you, and 2) instant response. What other modes are possible? Is there a place for modes like contemplation, focused preparation, small group collaboration, or timed individual activities (e.g. take two minutes to construct a response of 140 characters)?
If you are throwing out questions and activities, just as is the case with in-person teaching, indicating how long they have to think about or work on something before you’re going to move on to the next slide, mode, or topic helps them to gauge what depth of consideration and response is needed, and whether it’s worth putting something down. When teaching online we never see the chat contributions that get started and then discarded, just as we never hear the half-formed thoughts that don’t get voiced. It helps to know how ‘big’ the task is (I must have told you about the SAT paper that mysteriously offered 15 lines and a large number of marks for the question ‘Do you think Anne Frank is still alive’?).”