If I’m honest I thought the lesson was a bit of a disaster. I spent a lot of time thinking about what to do, coming up with something I thought was a bit different and original, taking advantage of the opportunity to experiment. I created a lesson plan, but in retrospect it wasn’t detailed enough. I had asked a friend to do a practice run-through with me, but she cancelled at the last minute, so I didn’t discover the technical issues until I actually did the lesson – big mistake. The main technical problem was that I was trying to share a video, but the ‘students’ couldn’t hear the sound. This threw me a bit, but I resolved it by sharing the link in the chat, but because I was nervous I stopped following my lesson plan. But the primary reason that my lesson was a disaster was that it was overly ambitious, and I realised in hindsight it was also confusing. I felt there was a lack of clarity about what the objectives were (teamwork and blurring the boundaries between creative disciplines). The instructions were unclear, partly because I abandoned my lesson plan, partly because I was attempting to give participants more autonomy by not trying to set too many boundaries, giving participants the freedom to create a live performance using their own terms and ideas about what a play or a short-performed text might consist of.
I still like the idea though, and would like to develop it further. Now I have the idea, I would make the lesson plan more detailed, with clear instructions that I would also write in the chat box. On the positive side, the group worked brilliantly as a team, even if they didn’t complete the task.
