It is quite sad really. We have just started to get to know each other and working together. I think I’ve been very lucky working with my peers in my groups, (whether by design or accident). I’ve enjoyed meeting and working with others.
However, today’s session wasn’t my favourite, simply because of the reading activity. Don’t get me wrong, it is a really helpful activity, especially for those who might find reading some of the papers and understanding them, a little more difficult than others. And it meant learning about more of the papers in a short period of time. Having someone share their own thoughts on the papers was very useful. However, I found the session very hard. The reading and the sharing (embarrassing) and the listening too, was hard. Too noisy to hear. (Suffering a bit of a cold meant my head was ready to explode). I’m not sure that I had much to contribute and those feelings of a fish out of water and Imposter syndrome were back!
Reading has never been a strength of mine. It takes me time to process and comprehend, especially academic writing, language can slow me down and analyzing is still not one of my strengths. But I am much better at this now, (I think).
Although this session was not one of my favourites, due to my own weaknesses in these activities, it was nevertheless an important session, demonstrating yet another useful tool that can be used in our teaching. This form of activity, collaborative reading and sharing, has a number of benefits, (despite my hating it!).
Getting students in a group to read different papers and share their findings, helps to speed up students’ acquisition of knowledge, information sharing, as they only have to read one paper and not all four papers, and yet they gain knowledge/information of all four when each is summarized for the group. So, this saves each student time.
It gives students an opportunity to learn from each other the different techniques that might be use for taking notes and summarizing. It may also make the information more accessible when summarized by a peer.
This form of scaffolding can be very useful when trying to expand students’ knowledge and reading, it is certainly a good way to share and learn about the different papers in a short period time, and a useful tool to add to my teaching belt!
It might have been useful after the reading activity for all of those who read the same paper to get together first before feeding back to others. This would give everyone a chance to share and develop their thoughts about the texts. This way, those with weaker readers in their group, would still learn something from the weaker reader. I don’t know just a thought!
It might also benefit others to use different rooms if available, so it is not so loud, or feedback one group at a time. Other people may have also struggled to hear what was being said.