Our 3rd session started with some warm up name games. I asked if people had thought about the creativity question from last time and we found that a lot of people had forgotten about it. Someone suggested using email as a reminder so this week I’ve emailed those present with the homework question.
We continued from last week’s creativity theme with a look at conformity. Often conformity is useful (driving on the left), but in solving problems (as one of our participants put it), if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.
One way of challenging conformity is to turn it on its head. We played a game where everyone wrote down an issue that bothered them, and we put these into a hat. The hat went round and everyone pulled a paper and had to ‘turn it on its head’. So if I had written traffic jams, then the person pulling that out could have said “traffic jams are good because they slow the cars down and there will be less accidents”.
We used a physical feedback method so I could get an understanding of how people found the workshops so far in terms of value (people said medium to high), pace (slow to medium) and fun (medium to fun).
We then moved on to the second part of the workshop: motivation. To start we played a game of paper, scissors, stone to pick who would go first. The 2 teams took a story about motivation and had 5 minutes to prepare a bit of theatre to illustrate the story. This was a lot of fun!
We then split into small groups to discuss how motivation can be increased in schools - an answer a lot of us are interested in! Suggestions from the groups included:
- using praise, allow everyone to solve problems in their own way,
- finding a way to make the learner need the understanding,
- for the learner to know why they are learning,
- find a way for the learner to experience in different ways the material.
The homework question that we finished on was “How can we get motivated to do things we don’t want to do naturally - and is this even possible?”