Microteaching and Me

Considering that I teach almost every day for work, delivering a microteaching session to colleagues was nerve-wracking. I think this experience was so useful for me to realise that I am confident and capable of my job – a great way to rid myself of imposter syndrome!

In preparation for the day, I found choosing the object to be relatively hard. I could have opted for the easy option of simply using an example CV or portfolio, which I use day to day, but I wanted to challenge myself. I knew whatever object that I chose, I would have to link it back to my specialist subject and the outcomes of the session. In my teaching practice, I work closely with international students and address diverse and inclusive employability and recruitment practices within industry. I wanted to highlight this to my colleagues, and how they could implement this topic into their own teaching, so decided to choose a miniature antique globe as my object.

When creating the presentation for the session, I wanted everyone to do the following:

• Write down three words to describe the physical appearance of the object
• Write down three positive and three negative words to describe how the object makes them feel, ignoring the appearance altogether

The reason I wanted everyone to begin by judging the objects appearance, was because this regularly happens to international students when applying for work; they often fear that they will be judged on their name, on their appearance, or because English is not their first language. The second activity (naming the positives and negatives) was to initiate discussion around what the globe makes us feel. Positives were things like “home”, “opportunity” and “life”; and negatives were things like “destruction”, “injustice” and “power”. This discussion then allowed me to link this back to the benefits of an inclusive workforce, and how recruiting international and culturally diverse students could allow for more sense of unity across the workforce, and the world.

Feedback from my colleagues was really valuable, and I was challenged by many of them as to how this could perhaps have been taken further. Could this session have been less “rigid” and actually have been free from the confines of a presentation. I have always wanted to ensure that I have a presentation that reiterates what I am saying in the room, but sometimes it can perhaps be too much of a comfort blanket. This is something I will be exploring further in my upcoming teaching.