Reflection of Learning Processes

Yesterday’s work with my students focused on musical theatre repertoire, currently looking at a specific show, ‘A Chorus Line’ with the intention of delving into characters and developing the student's understanding of narrative, physicality and characterisation. 

I was particularly looking forward to working with the students this week, as the exercise that I had planned to cover was an exploration of some of the learning processes that I feel I have gained from the BAPP programme, exploring the idea of developing ideas through questioning and gaining knowledge and understanding through experiential learning particularly focusing on the idea of reflective practice (Schon 1983, 1987), “the use of reflection in professional activities as a means of coping with situations that are unstructured” (Jennifer A. Moon, 2004). 

Within all my teaching I ensure that the planning of my lessons are with the aim of working towards goals and objectives such as ‘to gain a stronger understanding of the social background to the production’ or ‘to learn and successfully execute the opening sequence of choreography showcasing understanding of stylistics and strong technical execution’, but my planning tends to be meticulous in structure of tasks to try and give students as much guidance as possible in reaching these goals. This week I decided to broaden the learning objective, stating it as ‘to discover more about their character’. The exercise involved asking students to improvise the opening audition sequence of the show as their characters. I asked the student playing the director to lead the session. No further instruction. I was awaiting a series of questions and clarification of rules and parameters to be set from the students. Interestingly, no questions were asked and the students were excited at the prospect of the work.

The exercise began and students jumped right into the work and were actively engaged and experimenting with their physicality, characters, speech and most interestingly their interaction with each other, playing with the ideas of who their characters were gravitating towards, and the reactions that they were giving to each other. This resonated with me and made me think about the importance of learning about ourselves through networks around us, sharing ideas and ‘playing’ with thoughts and questions which can then be reflected on. This lead me to think further on a common discourse that is brought up within my establishment. The weighting of student led activity and contact time within a student’s course. Many believe that contact time is the best teaching approach and offers the most successful outcomes as a learning process to students, whereas there is an argument that students can discover more about the topics covered through self-motivation student led activity that allows them to generate their own ideas and reflect in action.

This discourse generates questions of its own;

·       Are these different approaches more effective in certain disciplines than others?

·       Does student led activity offer equal opportunities?

·       Which approach is more effective? 

·       Do some students find one process more beneficial than another?

Discussion through reflective writing on this day has allowed me look deeper into the learning processes applied to my practice, and think further about how to develop these. Using Kolb’s experiential learning cycle I can identify that through discussion with blogs, ideas have grown which relate to the Abstract Conceptualisation point of the cycle, with Active Experimentation taking place through the exercise working with my students, Concrete Experience following with the feelings I had both during and after the exercise and through witnessing students participation and learning, and Reflective Observation through forms such as this piece of writing. 

Bibliography;

Jennifer A. Moon. (2004). A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning. RoutledgeFalmer

Queens University Learning Hub. 2018. Kolb, David. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.queensu.ca/experientiallearninghub/about/what-experiential-learning. [Accessed 9 October 2018].