by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Assistant Professor, English and Creative Writing, WWU
If this title caught your eye it may be because, like me, you are an obsessive fan of The Great British Bake Off (GBBO), a show where amateur bakers attempt to wow judges and audiences with their recipes and presentations.
Or, maybe you are curious about how a conversation of GBBO can serve as a jumping-off point to working with your students on their oral communication, professionalism, leadership, and teamwork. These are competencies that are necessary for a healthy creative writing workshop (the environment where I usually teach), and they are also competencies that predict career readiness for students of any discipline.
I recently asked students to watch “Danish Week” (C6: E8 on Netflix) as a way to catapult us into a discussion of the value of live workshops, positive environments for writers, and giving effective feedback. I will share my methods and findings in this presentation. If you use workshops, peer review, or group projects with your students, I hope this presentation will offer you some ideas.
If you want to try using GBBO too, here are my recommendations:
1. Identify your goals, and make them clear to your students.
What knowledge or skills do you want your activity to attend to? Do you want your students to be able to give effective feedback in a peer review? Do you want to steer them away from value-judgements and hierarchical thinking? Do you want them to be more enthusiastic teammates? If so, give your students these questions before they watch as a way to prime their viewing.
2. Assign some reading as a companion to GBBO. The reading should align with your goals.
In order to participate effectively in a workshop environment, I first want students to be able to discuss (and value) what it means to be an effective teammate. I assigned a web article called “Characteristics of Good Teamwork” on Indeed. It’s a simplistic 7-minute read; it’s not what I would call a riveting read. But what I really want is for students to use it as a guide for evaluating the communication they see on GBBO. Do they see examples of respectful communication?
3. Model a few effective or positive responses.
We use the judging portion of GBBO to discuss effective practices for giving critical feedback. First, I review what I see as fundamental to giving effective feedback (considering my biases, being prepared, balancing praise and critical feedback, etc.). And then I do my best to model the behavior and expectations I have for students. I’m not an expert on this, but I think the modeling itself signals that I have high expectations for how students communicate in a workshop setting.
4. Give students time to think and write individually. Then, give them time to share in small groups before bringing the conversation back to the whole team.
I find that if I want participation to be well-distributed amongst my students, I need to give folks time and structure so they can articulate their thoughts. I also find that if my goal is for students to value teamwork, I need to give them opportunities to interact with their peers.
If I want to discuss a question, such as, “How do we want our communication practices to be different from GBBO?” I try to give students a few minutes to quickwrite on this. Then, I teleport them into breakout rooms to discuss in teams for 5-7 minutes, before I expect them to come back and speak in front of the whole class. My hope is that students feel more confident in speaking up and that what they share will be more clearly articulated. If you are teaching online, you can also encourage your students to share their ideas via chat as well as orally.
These steps also make use of some of Meg Weber’s Top Tips for Online Student Engagement.
5. Practice with them.
Research suggests that an experiential component improves student learning and retention. I got this idea from another Bellingham writer, Becky Mandelbaum, who also wrote a phenomenal article on GBBO. I ask students to get their hands on some common, inexpensive store-bought cookies (e.g. Oreos). And then we practice giving critical feedback about the cookies. By starting with something familiar and impersonal, I found that most students felt comfortable participating.
See also:
Image Attribution: Marta Ambrosetti, @w@n_!cons, and fizae from the Noun Project (CC-BY)