Reflections on my peers’ micro-teaching activities

During the micro-teaching session, two of my peers invited us to play a drawing game and those are the two sessions that stood out for me most. I have a long-standing interest in a learning-by-doing approach but this fascinated me how playing can also be such a valuable way of learning.

In one activity we were guided through different drawing exercises to complete in real time, given different constraints. Everyone participated and everyone seemed to have fun with it, even those, who considered themselves as not good at drawing. It was a lesson in drawing as performance, in experiencing space with your body but also materiality and imagination both influencing drawing. I would have liked to keep going with this game for longer. Unfortunately we did not get to see any references to those activities, otherwise I would have liked to read more about it and find ways of integrating those in my teaching.

In another activity, which was more focused on team-building and getting to know each other, we were also invited to draw, but to draw an item for the others to guess, an Activity type game. This really made us laugh, work together to find answers to solutions and was very engaging despite being held at a time where most people in the group started feeling a bit tired.

Two things stood out for me – that a fun activity or a game can be really uplifting at a time when the energy in the room (or on a video call) is low, for example directly after lunch or after several hours of a lecture. The other thing is that if you ask students to participate in some drawing even if they don’t usually draw, or invite them to play a collaborative guessing game, it opens them up to share and talk about their feelings, and laugh together. I hope to do more of that in my future teaching.