It was inspiring having the chance to experience everyone’s approach to the task and see the creative interpretations. Ulrike, Rain and Tom guided us to participate in a learning activity through drawing. As a former designer migrating to the business school, I realised how much I miss drawing and how engaging it was to step away from the computer!

Online Miro and Padlet boards are excellent tools to support collaborative work but implementing simple drawing exercises could offer high student engagement and a break in the ‘Fashion Business’ approach in class. Around half of my students come from a Fashion Design background, so I am certain that they would welcome this, although my other students from Business Management backgrounds might not be as comfortable. The day was very enjoyable and inspiring.  

Reflection on my session 

I had missed an (important!) email and didn’t realise that we would be together in our small C3 tutor group. I had planned my activity around a bigger group as I thought that the whole C group was going to be in a room together. For this reason, I had planned for everyone to collaborate on a Miro board in smaller groups, which did not make much sense with a smaller group. To make things worse there was no projector to show the progress of my planned Miro board. With a lack of laptops in the room, there was no easy way to share the link to the board too.  

This was an important reminder of how you need to think on your feet, when the session does not go to plan and that you need to consider this in your preparation. I should have gathered the same information from the Miro board in a printed one-pager. This would have supported the collaborative work even if we had been able to access the board. In this way, it would have worked better for everyone to discuss the main questions and make use of the sub-questions too. I had to read them out instead, which was a bit too overwhelming with information. 

The positive feedback of my microteaching session included that there was potential in my investigative learning approach and that I had conducted this well. It was great to see that I had managed to find an object that was interesting based on the group’s engagement. I agree with the suggestion that I could have made more out of the final stage to explore the discovered themes such as ‘Made in the UK’. The feedback further included that giving some background info is interesting and this is adding an element of storytelling that can capture the attention of learners. This feedback correlates with the peer observation feedback from Ike. He suggested bringing in more of myself could engage my students even more.  

Based on the microteaching day, I can now see how I could take object-based learning into my teaching practice, and I feel more confident trying this approach with my own students.