I attended my first session with my Friday group. As I walked upstairs to the room where we would be learning about the history of education, and theories, and engaging in discussions and debates, my excitement grew. The room was brimming with the energy of my fellow PgCerters, and everyone was busy getting to know each other. After settling down and finding a group to sit with, I was given a label with my name on it, which made it easy for everyone at our table to address each other by name. We kicked off with a few icebreaker exercises to break the ice and get to know each other better. As I took part in these activities, I started thinking about how I could integrate them into my teaching practice to allow students to engage better with me and their peers.
In the first icebreaker activity, Lindsay passed us a ball of string. The idea was to pass the ball on to another person while continuing a conversation based on the question given to us and see pattern it was creating.
Whilst the pattern appeared to be a tangled mess, it showed how our conservations flowed and encouraged us to keep our conversations going. I found myself in a group of people I had never met before, and the only thing we had in common was our teaching practice. However, this exercise helped us to get to know each other better without any judgment. It taught us to keep eye contact, and I was genuinely interested in what each person had to say. Without realising it, I felt like I was able to connect with every person and develop a sense of belonging (Goodenow, 1993) to this group in a short amount of time. In the next icebreaker activity, we were shown a pile of art postcards and each of us was asked to choose one that spoke to us as a person. We were asked to think about how the postcard reflects us as person, what we liked about it and discuss our teaching practice. I chose the postcard (Figure one) because it gave me a glimpse of what I would become in the coming months: a student studying and staring into space. As someone with an art background, I was drawn to the colours, medium, brush techniques, and textures used to create the painting. After seeing the imagery on the postcard, I was curious to learn its name, and to my surprise, it was called ‘Stay Focused.’ It was fitting because it was a source of motivation that I needed to get through each unit of this course. It also reminded me to stay focused even when I had to do other tasks that had become urgent.
Next, each of us discussed why we chose the postcard we picked. We became vulnerable with each other as we shared our personalities, which allowed me to understand how students could become vulnerable with me as a teacher, whether they were asking questions or sharing their work with me.
These two icebreaker exercises were insightful, they showed me how to incorporate them into my teaching practice to enhance the student experience. It will encourage creativity, engagement, and collaboration among students, and allowed them to better interaction with their peer and between myself and them. (Goodenow, 1993).
References
Goodenow, C. (1993).’Classroom belonging among early adolescent students: Relationships to motivation and achievement’, The Journal of Early Adolescence, 13(1).