There is no lecture, lab or tutorial for this session!
If you are not presenting your workshop during this session, use the time to prepare for next week and/or your final presentation and report.
Session Objective:
- Conduct a food literacy workshop with your assigned VSB school stakeholder.
Guidelines for a successful workshop:
- Send an email 1-2 days prior to remind school stakeholders of your visit (include date, time, location, purpose and estimate duration of workshop)
- Be prepared for the unexpected! When conducting workshops, something is bound to happen that requires quick thinking! Be as prepared as possible but don’t be afraid to improvise.
- Leave plenty of time for traffic, preparation for your activity and clean up once you have finished. A 60-minute presentation can require 120mins of actual work on the ground.
- Conduct your workshop! Talk slowly and ask the VSB students questions to assess how much they already know about the subject you are teaching.
- The VSB teacher must always be present during the workshops. LFS 250 students are not permitted to be unsupervised with VSB students at anytime.
- Thank the school stakeholder and VSB students for allowing you to be a part of their community of learners.
- Ask your school stakeholder for feedback on your workshop (data for your final report!) and make sure one group member is observing student behaviour during the session as evidence of effectiveness of your workshop (e.g. were students engaged and on-task? After the workshops, were students able to correctly answer questions related to the workshop? etc). If your school stakeholder is unavailable right after the workshop, ask her/them/him if it would be ok to receive feedback via email.
Workshop Do’s + Don’ts
- DO NOT LECTURE! K-12 students (like the rest of us) are most engaged with brief explanations and lots of hands-on activities.
- Do not make a powerpoint presentation.
- Make sure your workshop has an introduction, middle, and conclusion.
- Ask the VSB students questions about the subjects/topics you are planning to teach them about in order to 1) engage them in the lesson and 2) gauge how much they already know about the topic. You would be surprised at how much the VSB students already know.
- Do practice your workshop before hand. Doing a practice workshop will give you a better sense of timing which is crucial for success in a VSB setting (you will not be allowed to go overtime).
- Do prepare for the unexpected. Be flexible and calm if something does not go as planned (e.g. traffic, illness, forgotten item…).
- Leave time for set-up and clean up…both take longer than anticipated.