Dallas, Day 4

Monday morning. The workshop was to continue today. As part of the workshop, I had four hours to choose a topic, and prepare, for my practice teaching. Actually, I had already decided not to teach about knots ( 😉 ), because I figured I learn best when I make mistakes, and I didn’t think I would make very many mistakes teaching about knots.

I decided to talk about personality and the value as an teacher/trainer of being aware of one’s personality. That’s a very big topic, so I spent most of my four preparation hours trying to narrow and focus the content. I sought and received lots of input from the person who was to be my assistant and the workshop facilitators. My preparation time ran out and I wasn’t nearly as ready as I would have liked be, but I was trusting in my ability to be spontaneous.

When it came time to do my practice teaching, I had the people in the workshop talk about one of the personality scales from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: Thinking (T) and Feeling (F), with which most of the participants were familiar. I had them remember the characteristics of T and F, to consider how they reflect God’s glory, to consider how these characteristics are affected by sin, and to consider what this means for the trainer/teacher. This part of my presentation took 40 minutes. I only had 40 minutes for the whole presentation. I ran out of time! Oh well, I quickly wrapped up by saying how Jesus is the only one who frees us from sin’s affects on our personality to be ourselves in such a way that we can be a blessing to others.

Every time someone finished a practice teaching, the facilitators would sit the presenter and his/her assistant in front of the group and asked us what we liked about our presentation and what we would change if we were to do it over again. Then the facilitators allowed everyone else to comment on what they liked and what suggestions they might have for improving the presentation.

While I didn’t feel like I had done well, I was commended for (apparently) fearlessly giving a presentation attempting to teach adults who were mostly more than twice my age, and also for tackling such a hard topic. Mostly, though, they offered me many good ideas of how to improve the presentation, should I give it again.

Over all, the practice teaching was a very good experience. I’m sure that I’m still processing through it, but I know that I at least learned the following:

• It takes a lot of work to prepare a presentation–so much thought should go into it to make it useful and applicable to audience. I suppose I knew this before, but I learned it again, and more deeply.
• Trusting in spontaneity to pull off a presentation is not a good idea when I don’t have a firm command of the topic. I can use my gift of being spontaneous, but I should depend only on that.
• Giving a presentation didn’t feel like what I expected it to. It was not as daunting to be in front of the “audience” as I thought, and it was a lot harder not to be self-conscious.
• Being self-conscious and wondering what people are thinking of you are not particularly useful or effective things to do while giving a presentation 🙂

Thank you all for your prayers for my practice teaching–I know that they were answered.

After giving my presentation, I had not much else to do than participate in the rest of the workshop. There was still one more day to go and, needless to say, I felt so much better the rest of the day  not having a  practice teaching looming over my head 😀