Last week I had the unique opportunity of teaching two back-to-back workshops for two very different audiences: one was a webinar for 80+ teachers from around the country and the other was an in-person class for 25 roller skaters in a park. The interesting thing is that both workshops were very similar in structure.
This is the structure of the teacher webinar on media analysis I co-led earlier that day:
- Introduction: who we are, what we are doing today
- Description of the skill: what is media analysis, why it’s important, where you might encounter it
- Demo: Media analysis demonstration and discussion
- Practice: Analyze sample media together
- Discuss: How will you integrate this into teaching practice?
- Closer: Where to go to learn more
The flow of the skating class was very similar:
- Introduction: who I am, what we are doing today
- Ice Breaker: name a dancer you admire and why
- Description of the skill: what is cyphering and freestyle, why it’s important, where you might encounter it
- Demo: Cypher demonstration and discussion
- On Your Own Exercises: by skill level and comfort
- Group Activity: Group cypher time!
- Closer: What did you learn? What’s something you want to improve at?
Really this encapsulates my pedagogical approach to anything:
- Introduce the idea, concept, or skill
- Break it down to understand how it works and what it’s components are
- Ask students to practice the skill or explore the concept on their own
- Discuss what they learned and how they might incorporate it
- Close with a group activity or share out
This is aligns with my constructivist approach to learning, e.g. that knowledge is created individually by each learner, needs to be experienced and contextualized for their individual worldview, but also that learning is best done in a social context.
Roller skating is a particularly fitting for constructivist learning, since we all have different bodies, different sets of prior knowledge that relate to skating, different levels of comfort with the various sub-skills, and different personal goals as skaters. And it’s a hobby, not a job, so we are supposed to having fun!
Here’s a more detailed break down of the process , which might be helpful for other learning experiences I develop in the future.
Breakdown of a Skate Mini-workshop
Background: Every Tuesday evening, my local skate group organizes a “skill share,” where folks in the community are invited to teach a drop-in lesson for anyone who wants on a particular skill that skaters are interested in learning. We’ve had a skill share on spinning, fast skating, backwards skating, and specific moves like the corkscrew, the dip, and the grapevine.
The Learners: What’s fun and challenging is the large variety of folks who show up for these classes. Some people literally just got their first pair of skates in the mail. Others have been skating for years. Some are feeling anxious about learning a new skill and others are very enthusiastic learners. So the whole gamut. And since its a free drop-in class, literally anyone could show up!
The Classroom: We teach in a beautiful outdoor skating rink in the middle of a public park. It’s open to anyone just wandering by, and its subject to all the random nonsense you encounter in a city — traffic noise, kids racing through on their scooters, wind, rain, etc.
Introduction
I like to set a clear expectation for what we are doing in any workshop I run. This is particularly important for a drop-in class. For myself, I want to know what the instructor has in store, which reduces anxiety and uncertainty for me.
Demo
I want folks to have a clear idea of the goal. So they know what we are aiming for. Otherwise, they might not know what they are supposed to be working towards. In this case, I had a couple of people help demonstrate what freestyle skating looks like. And then I had the participants talk about what they observed.
Individual Exercises
Next up I like to get people doing something as soon as I can. Skating is an embodied experience, so verbal explanations and visual demos are less helpful than actually trying it yourself.
This is where the students get to try the thing on for size and see how it feels. In this case, I had my beginner skaters brainstorm one or two moves that they feel fairly confident performing, then practice doing them in sequence to music.
I walk around and give individual support, but otherwise let people work on their own, at their own pace.
The Share Out
This is where they verbalize to others what they learned, how it went, and what questions they have. Always there are others who have similar experiences. Or they learn something from someone else’s experience. This could be done round robin with everyone sharing something, or asking for volunteers, or a “pair share” where you turn to your neighbor and talk about it.
The Group Activity
This is where we get to celebrate and bring it all together. Share the thing you worked on with the group. Feel what that is like. Get positive feedback from the group.
For my skate workshop, this was closing with a “cypher” where anyone could go into the circle and share any moves that they felt like sharing. Seeing people who had never performed on skates before go into the center and show off their favorite move or two was so heart warming and inspiring. Everyone gets a chance to shine and get applauded from the group. It’s the best.
The Closer
I always like to wrap up with some questions for them to consider. What are you taking home with you? What do you want to try next? How might this impact your practice?
In this case, it was just a general share out of what the experience was like and what they learned.