Triads...

I attended Neil's workshop today, it started with a talk about his Shift/Work project at ESW this summer, which was interesting but, given that I was involved to some extent already, not entirely new to me... Once Neil had talked about the project we then moved on to an exercise in triad tutorials, the subject of the third Shift/Work workshop, originally lead by Sarah Tripp, who I believe is going to follow up on todays workshop later in the semester. 


A triad tutorial consists of a speaker, (the person who is receiving the tutorial), a listener, (the person giving the tutorial), and a witness/observer. The speaker starts by speaking, naturally, about a given subject for a predetermined amount of time, In our case 10 minutes. During this time the listener listens and is free to make notes while the observer watches the two, making notes about the whole interaction. Once the 10 minutes are up it is then the listeners turn to speak, also for 10 minutes, also uninterrupted. The listener feeds back to the speaker who now listens, again while the observer does his/her best to be objective. Once the second 10 minutes is up the observer reads back his observations to both the speaker and the listener. This process is then repeated twice more, rotating the role of the participants each time.


The experience was both interesting and useful and I always welcome different approaches to crits... anything that might help... If nothing else it is reassuring to be part of a course that is looking to examine it's own modes of assessment and criticality... several people commented that it was difficult or unusual to talk uninterrupted for so long. Also that even though everybody talked for an equal amount of time, that it didn't feel as if anyone had conversed. These things are new and challenging and for those reasons, among others, I look forward to more.