Photo by Fox: https://www.pexels.com/photo/group-of-people-watching-on-laptop-1595385/
During this class, we had the opportunity to discuss topics of interest with our peers. We generated questions individually on sticky notes, then posted these questions on the wall, which we then voted on. The questions with the most votes were given dedicated spaces for discussion. The question I chose was “How can we prevent burn-out in our students?” I was particularly interested in this question, as I feel like I have experienced burn-out many times in my undergrad, and I want to know the best ways I can help prevent it for my future students. One of my peers shared with my group about this study that she conducted, and how they discovered how students tend to become apathetic about their education. This was something I had not known before, and talking about it made me realize that this was something that I had been experiencing right now. I have become so overworked with school, work, and my personal life, that I started to care less about everything. For a while, I felt completely checked out of school, because I had no energy to participate anymore. However, discussing this with my group helped me realize that this wasn’t something unusual, and I was grateful to know that I wasn’t alone in my feelings. I know that having personal experience with burn-out will help me be more empathic to my future students who will experience similar feelings, and I hope that will help me support them better.
I really liked the idea of EdCamp, however, I think that the effectiveness of this exercise relied heavily on students really participating in discussion (which, in my experience, did not really happen.) If this exercise is to be effective, I believe that a class culture perhaps needs to be better established, as for students to be able to feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts.
In implementing this into my future music classrooms, I like the idea of giving students the autonomy to generate questions to discuss in groups, and I think this could work well with student inquiry.