EDUC5105, Unit 5: I made this!
Even though I have a podcast and spend almost every hour at work talking, I still get a flip-flop feeling in my stomach when I hear a recording of myself. Chalk this up to a sneaking feeling of self-doubt. For Activity 3 in EDUC5105, we were tasked with creating a recorded presentation that reflected on our experience within the course. Not bad right? I record stuff on the daily. I know how to talk. What could be hard about that right? The hard part is that a pecha kucha can only be a maximum of 20 slides, with 20 seconds spent on each slide, for a grand total of 6:40 seconds, maximum. By the end of this, I was surprised at the amount of things that I had to say.
The Artifact
The artifact can be seen below, and I’ve got to say, gathering the 20 photos that I would use for all of my slides was my favourite part of this assignment. Because I enjoy an added layer of challenge, I wanted to see if the images that I used for my pecha kucha could be only photos that I’d taken, and it had me digging through 12 years worth of Google Photos. This was, in itself, a reflective action - I wasn’t expecting to spend a few hours thinking about how far I’ve come since first stepping foot inside a classroom to where I am now. To be fair, I still have a ways to go, but I’ve put some distance between my current self and the nervously sweating 27-year old who had dishcloths in the armpits under his polo shirt to prevent stains on the first day of his teaching internship.
Getting back to the artifact itself: over the course of 20 slides I talked about my impressions of the course, my thoughts on each unit - reactions, feelings, thoughts - and my journey as a learner in general. While the speed of this course was at times overwhelming, and I often didn’t have time to reflect, this assignment was a really good way to pause and actively consider the value of what I’d learned over the past six weeks.
As a teacher, this is an assignment that might be helpful to your students in helping them contextualize and pause to consider their learning and development. Personally, I feel that it’s easy to get wrapped up in ensuring enough content has been delivered, and would like my students to spend more time on reflection so that they can properly consolidate everything they’ve learned.
A tool for addressing imposter syndrome
As a reflective practice, I think a pecha kucha can be just as helpful to professionals. Making an active effort to sift through past artifacts of my own learning is an activity that I think I’ll engage in more, and something that I would encourage other teachers to do. If you’re a pre-service teacher, document wherever you can - write it down, take a picture/video (within the bounds of professionalism, of course), and then don’t look at it again for a while. As time goes on, I think making it a point to spend a period of time going through these artifacts is important to see how you’ve developed, as the job sometimes moves so fast that it’s hard to see any progress at all.
Research by Brems et al. (1994) notes that imposter phenomenon (I always thought it was syndrome, but it’s actually phenomenon) can have a detrimental effect beyond the confines of your mind, noting that feelings of being an imposter “influence a person’s self esteem, professional goal-directedness, locus of control, mood and relationships with others” (p.184). I must note that this is strictly about my professional self, as I don’t feel a sense of imposter phenomenon outside of the workplace; however, inside the workplace is a different story. A pecha kucha (even an informal one where you just talk about pictures on your phone with a friend) could be helpful here. For this activity, I was lucky to have an audience of people who were kind enough to provide pecha kuchas of their own that I got to watch, and they in turn watched and commented on mine.
All that being said, I think the value of my pecha kucha specifically is for other educators to see that if they ever have a feeling of self doubt or if they ever start feeling a sense of not being “good enough”, they’re not alone. Again, I really hesitated in constructing this, but I figured if I could get my thoughts out there and make someone feel better if they were feeling the same way, then why not? Similarly, just talking about your experiences up to a certain point are a great way to take stock of where you’ve been, and where you’re going.
Finally, this is a shameless self-plug: If you haven’t already, take a listen to my podcast. A while ago, I started a podcast because Dana, my awesome teaching partner turned Consultant extraordinaire for KPMG, said we had some pretty thoughtful and funny teaching stories, so why not? Since then, That High School Life has become a reflective thinking project that I make with guests and students.
Source
Brems, C., Baldwin, M. R., Davis, L., & Namyniuk, L. (1994). The Imposter Syndrome as Related to Teaching Evaluations and Advising Relationships of University Faculty Members. The Journal of Higher Education, 65(2), 183. https://doi.org/10.2307/2943923