OER4Schools/How to run workshops

Title: 0.4 - An introduction to facilitating the OER4Schools programme
Number: 0.4

The OER4Schools Professional Learning Resource

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0.4 - An introduction to facilitating the OER4Schools programme >>>

Facilitator's version, Participants' version

Things to consider when facilitating workshops

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Learn about ideas for facilitation

The organisation Seeds for change has good resources on facilitating workshops and meetings. If you are running this programme as a series (bi-)weekly two-hour meetings, please have a look at the short guide for facilitating meetings, or the full guide for facilitating meetings. If you are running whole day workshops, you might also want to look at the short guide for facilitating workshops, or the full guide for facilitating workshops.

Procedural things

Timing. As a workshop facilitator, you should consider how to use the present material, and what form your workshop will take. The resource could be used in

• weekly or bi-weekly session of say 2 hours each (e.g. teacher group meetings in a school or regular scheduled sessions in a teacher education college),
• for whole day workshops,
• or a mixture of those.

You should negotiate this with the participants. We provide guidance but as a facilitator running a course based on these materials you will need to make your own plan, and evaluate this plan as you progress.

ICT use in the classroom will be introduced in the workshops. Teachers need a basic level of ICT skills, for instance how to type, how to open a web browser and open applications, how to write documents and spreadsheets, etc. If your workshop participants have no prior ICT skills, you need to allow time for them to practise those skills.

Follow-up and practical classroom activities: End each session with planning for follow-up activities, eg classroom trials, lesson planning, readings, etc. Each session has got follow-up activties which are reviewed at the start of the next session.

As the workshop facilitator, clearly signpost what is happening at each stage in the workshop. E.g. you might say “We now look at interactive teaching.“

Adapting the format of the resource to the specific context. Ideally, there would be at least the following contexts:

• Paper only. Possibly only the facilitator has a copy of the materials but ideally users do too.
• Semi-digital: There’s one computer / projects
• Fully digital: There are several computers with sound, and participants are able to watch various videos in groups.

ICT practice: Different-tasks group work with ICT and activity planning

Each session has got a space reserved for doing ICT practice, many of these (especially in later units) are just called "ICT practice: Different-tasks group work with ICT and activity planning".

While participants learn about their own use of ICT, it is really important that participants are aware of their own learning process. While they are learning about ICT, participants should think about how they could engage their students in the same learning process.

This of course could apply to learning anything new, but in the context of the OER4Schools programme, ICT is likely to be a completely new skill, so it's particularly important to bring awareness to the process.

Depending on the ICT availability and the number of participating teachers, it may be a good idea to draw up a timetable as to when which teachers (and classes) use the available netbooks. This ensures that

• there are no clashes, but also
• that the netbooks are used as much as possible.

It may be helpful to have this timetable on public display, and teacher "tick" their slot when they have actually used the ICT. If there is little or no use of the ICT by teachers in class, then this should be discussed, for instance in the session slot named "Connecting with overarching goals of the programme" (see below).

Running the first workshop: Some ice breakers

What are the issues with primary education in your country? Why are people invited to the OER4schools programme?

What are teachers’ expectations (attend for the whole year - starting off weekly)? Some people will be concerned with big picture, others with detail. Agree the day of the week for f2f meetings.

Some expectations about what a workshop should be like. Modelling activities in the workshop on activities planned for the classroom. (Modelling participation and interactivity at all levels.)

Introduce this resource and the topics within it

introduce strategies to incorporate interactive elements (things you might say, things you might do)

thinking about your own practice; do you think you’d like to try one of these new approaches?

Do you want a buddy system (pairs of teachers matched by grade or subject)?

Running the first session.

What are the educator notes here?

Setting up the room - remove tables? Chairs in circle? Tables arranged in islands?

What props are needed? Sheets of papers and pens? May be hard to find for some schools.

Ice breaker Welcome everybody to the workshop.

You start the workshop with an “ice breaker”.

We would suggest first name basis.

Icebreaker 1 (for a group of colleagues):

Stand up and sing a song together.

Icebreaker 2 (for group of participants who don’t know each other well):

People say one or two words that describe themselves (such as “funny”, “sociable”, “shy”).

OR Chat in pairs, and then introduce your neighbour to the group.

Icebreaker 3 (for either colleagues or strangers):

• people form themselves into groups of 3
• they have a conversation for no more than 3 min, 1 min each, on a specified topic, e.g. their favourite foods, what activity they are glad to be rid of and don't have to tackle today, their worst fantasy about what could go wrong as a consequence of the workshop...
• facilitator claps their hands after each minute to signal changeover; after 3 min, groups dissolve and form new groups; facilitator changes the topic at this point and after every 3 min until everyone has spoken to everyone else
• people have to stand up the whole time and move around - it is very energising, normally beginning quite quietly and ending up very loud!
• the next activity might connect with this icebreaker, for example asking volunteers to report back on their worst fantasy about what could go wrong in their classroom as a consequence of the professional development programme?!

Consider whether there is a hierarchy among the participants?

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