thoughts following group Skype tutorial

My main thoughts after today's discussion were about being in a new learning situation myself and how beneficial this is to my work. 
Perhaps one of the best ways to help students is to be a student yourself. I feel I am moving much closer towards empathising with their concerns, difficulties and processes, to a much greater degree then I have been able to in the past.  I'm gaining great insights from all involved in MAPPDTP as to how to provide inspiration, through the things I say or do as a teacher to help facilitate this learning process for the students I work with. Others were saying this as well this morning, but it's taken many weeks for this thought to crystallise for me! 

Another point that stayed with me was about openness. Allowing for the twists and turns in progress. It's strange as I feel I can be very open in a choreographic process and quite happy not to know what I am aiming for, to accept things as they develop, but when in a more academic process there seems to be a tendency towards rigidity and inflexibility!  maybe this is a result of being out of the comfort zone, trying to make sense of new knowledge and skills, and is to be expected and acknowledged.

Regarding practicalities and study tools, something that I've recently been working on is to try and prioritise, or rank, the different sources of information for the course. To decide, or find out, which are the most reliable and important, which the most up to date, which the most useful. This is also something I've been attempting to do with the various texts I've been reading.  

Good to clear up the hand-in details today. I get a little confused by differences in university procedures between where I work and Middlesex so great to clarify it all.

positive/negative learning experiences

I'm thinking today about positivity and negativity in relation to the characteristics of a learner and attempting to relate this to myself and my previous learning experiences. I've often felt reluctance to voice more negative thoughts as I worry about how it will be perceived but Boud, Keogh and Walker (1985) talk about this in Reflection:Turning Experience into Learning and when reading it I felt a kind of affirmation that what I had been feeling, in relation to past training experiences, was important and should be taken into account.  They use the term 'emotional load' to describe the feelings that people often carry with them from previous learning situations, whether, positive or negative,  and how these feelings can have a huge impact on someones present  ability to learn in certain situations.  Teachers will often never know about the past experiences of their students, so I'm not sure yet what to do with this idea but I feel it will help to be more aware of this issue in my teaching practice.