Taught my first class today

[Scott (formerly Digga)]

I've been brought in as a Guest Lecturer for an SM Course at Eastern Connecticut State University and will be teaching for 3 days.  Today was my first and involved Blocking Notation. 

I think it went well.  I was nervous since I haven't taught a class of any kind since I was in Boy Scouts about 20 years ago.  I think I may have spoken a little too quickly at times and started running out of things to talk about with about 15-20 min left in the class. But the teacher was happy with it and the students seemed involved.

Next Tuesday I'll be taking the role of director and will be directing a scene from one of my past shows while the students take the blocking notation.  It's a small scene but I should easily be able to fill up the hour and 15 minutes by changing blocking options and working with the actors. 

Then next Thursday I teach a class on Managing Personalities.  That one may be a little trickier.  It's hard to talk about what we do and keep the students involved.  I don't like lecturing the entire time but I've gotten a great article from the professor from which to work off.  I just need to do more planning as far as writing up a guideline for me to follow.

The best part is getting the teaching experience for me.  I'm trying to get into Grad School so I can get my MFA and be able to teach consistently and this is a good chance to see if I really like it.  So far so good!

[juliec]

Hi Scott!  Hope this isn't too late to be useful, was just scrolling through older posts...

It's so awesome that you're getting a chance to share all the knowledge you have!  You said you don't like lecturing so I had some ideas on this topic that I've seen work (though they might depend on the time you have).  Pretty much all the training I've seen has involved knowing your own type of personality (that's half the battle)!

- situational role-playing.  I liked it better when there was only one example to watch (as opposed to splitting the class into pairs) because we spent some time afterward talking about it and it made principles much more concrete.  I've seen this done with both students as both people AND also with the facilitator as one of the people (great when it's about working with "difficult" personalities).

- self-evaluation quiz: half of learning to work with others is understanding how you work, so people get a better understanding of themselves, and a framework for understanding others' personality types.  Discussion about people's relationships with their own type, and about getting to know the various types.

- exercises: done after everyone in the class knows their "type".  Class is split into teams with type distribution and have a certain amount of time to accomplish a creative task.  Discussion about specific interactions with different types of people, knowing the other person's type might explain some of the conflicts that arose, etc.