Opening Circle & Feedback on Day 4 - same format

Short Straw 10 – last Worst fear. Really fascinating – we once had a participant whose worst fear was to be left holding everything together. He managed to engineer a pass on his first turn. Someone else moved up the queue, which meant on the last day, suddenly he was both the Facilitator (A) AND, because everyone else had already been a support to another teacher, he had to be his own support (B) as well, which was a very dramatic illustration of his worst fear. It went spectacularly well.

Accreditation – this was a hot-seat exercise in which we each went in front of the group, and self-validated according to a hierarchy of difficulty in terms of teaching. The list, in order of rising difficulty was:-

1.    Speaking to people about Co-Co
2.    Assisting on a Fundamentals Course
3.    Co-Teaching a Fundamentals Course
4.    Solo-Teaching a Fundamentals Course
5.    Co- teaching a Teacher Training Course
6.    Solo-teaching a Teacher Training Course.

As each person self-accredited, the group would then accredit us in turn. Usually, the level of conformity between the individual and the group assessment was very high, but occasionally individuals were supportively told by group members that they would need to do more work before being accredited to do all the things they wanted.

Qualities of Good Teacher Poster – we flip-charted the positive qualities of good teaching that we would want to see on a Fundamentals, or that we had seen from individuals during the week.

Goal Setting re Co-Co – we used the Goal-Setting Co-Co technique in pairs to make space for individuals to set out their own plans of where they would be going next with all the information they had collected over the week.

Closing Circle – this was the last CC to be run by a participant, and was debriefed in the usual way.

Resent/Appreciate on the day – as part of our normal daily wind-down we performed this process

Resent/Appreciate on the Course – because this was the last part of the 5 day course, we used the flipchart to remind the group of the things they had been wanting from the course. We asked them to assess whether they had achieved and or received the things they had been looking for. This allowed the group to leave the course having made any last statements that they needed to in order to leave the event intact, i.e. without anything else that they needed to say.

Course Closure – often involved tears as well as a lot of laughter. After each one we were able to say, “This just keeps getting better!!!”