Its been a While!!

Its been a while since I have made a post and reflected on my teaching practise and how I am using what we have learnt in our classes. Doesn't mean to say I haven't been thinking about it. To be honest I haven't been motivated at all to even bother with this due to a tragedy in my family.
Since I last blogged we have had some great sessions with Kate and have loved the activities we have done in those classes and will take the time to put up some reflections from those. We also had a great session with Nuddy last night that has helped us all to get back on track with our wiki's and blogs. Last nights discussion was based in the direction of evaluating our teaching spaces from our perspectives and also looking at it from our students perspectives!!
I will soon post up what we have been doing this term and what I have trialed and not trialed in classes I teach.


Till then......................

Team Building

I find it hard trying out a lot of the activities and ideas we talk about and do in class as a lot of my teaching is based on Practical lessons.

This week was my turn for running the Outdoors ABL sessions with the Certificate class. I decided to make my focus on using initiative, team work and problem solving.
I choose two activities that required less moving around and then a high energy game for the last part of the session so they would finish on a high. We do two days of this and the class is split into two streams. It was really interesting seeing the difference in the streams and how they handled the activities. We did Traffic Jam, Toxic Waste and Balloon Train. With Stream 2 on Thursday we also did Balloon Stomp as we had extra time.

Some of the groups worked really well together and some of the groups gave up quite easily and wanted to know the answers then and there. Their was frustration from people and also delight when the light bulb came on when they figured out the solution to the activity!!

It was also really interesting seeing them doing Initiative games as they require a lot of patience and team work to get to the end solution. It was really important in the session to keep the group moving on the activities and keeping them engaged before they got distracted. You very quickly see who takes lead in these types of activities and who stands back and doesn't have any input.

One Element that I should of made sure of was back up activities or things to do if one group finished faster than the others. Teaching to all abilities can be a hard task at times, however because we do a lot of team teaching it takes some pressure off.

I found a huge difference in the groups from the Wednesday to the Thursday. Some days they come in really competitive and motivated and noisy and other days they come in really flat and you have to really encourage them.