In this post: being a director on First Year Skills Workshops; trying new things; learning by doing.

I wrote a few weeks ago about being a Guest Director on the University of Liverpool’s First Year Skills Workshop programme, and how that first workshop had been a lot of fun. I’ve done another since then, and have another coming up this week. Thankfully the last workshop didn’t involve trying any more exotic insect recipes, and the next one (themed around disaster prevention and management) also seems unlikely to see me eating any more mealworm cookies.

Aside from the unusual biscuits, what’s been great about this experience over the last month has been the opportunity to try out lots of new things in a short space of time: from taking on the director role, to trying new activities within the workshop; from reworking my Prezi so that it will deliver more information with fewer words, to trying different approaches in group review.

What I love about working on the FYSWs is that chance to try something, learn from it, adapt and try it again maybe in a different way, but all in a short space of time. I maintain that it’s just as much a learning experience for us tutors on the course as it is for the PGR participants – and we make a big effort to practice the experiential learning ethos that we preach in the introduction and throughout.

This learning cycle (or one of them at least) is sometimes paraphrased as “What? So what? Now what?” By thinking and reflecting actively, rather than just passively taking things onboard I’ve seen a dramatic difference in the way that people learn from their experiences. I’m still trying to unpick for myself why it is such a powerful tool for personal development and skills training (apart from the obvious) – so if you have any thoughts please share them in the comments.

This week I’m looking forward to running a tweaked version of the creativity exercise that went over really well two weeks ago, to taking another stab at delivering the project introduction, and to another cohort of people eager to try things out and have some fun – people who are happy to just give things a go and see what happens.

During the workshop I’m going to be tweeting highlights from the course, and I might highlight this to the cohort as well, see if this is something that can be used in an interesting way. Follow me, I’m @DrRyder!