I’ve decided to use my blog as a reflective tool while doing my dissertation project – the final component of my M.A. in ELT –  hypothesising that this will make it an even more effective learning experience for me, by mapping it, enabling me to look back on my thought processes and decisions and see what effect these have on the project development. (Other posts in this series can be found here) Once I get to the end (13th September is D-Day!), as well as looking back over the experience of doing the project, I plan to try and evaluate the effect of these reflective blog posts on it.

The project plods on…

I had another tutorial last Tuesday, which, much like previous ones, has given me much to chew over and implement. It’s funny how when H points things out, they become blindingly obvious – but not until then! I now have a nearly complete draft of everything. I say nearly complete because although I’m on draft two, the redrafting has involved rather a lot of gutting and re-crafting, so there are still gaps… And then there’s the teachers book: I did it along side the student book, unit by unit, but then came all the changes – the teachers book has a lot of catching up to do!

I’m learning a lot from this process. For example:

• That I tend to waffle in my instructions! I’m getting better at this now, since Sandy Millin gave me some training in being more concise…
• That making materials that are to stretch over a series of lessons piecemeal in between going to work, eating, sleeping and so on, means I end up with something that lacks flow overall. So part of the redrafting and re-crafting process has been looking for the flow.
• That it’s easy to lose track of the theories you’d adopted as you get distracted by trying to design activities. (This is where going back to the rationale and making sure I’ve done what I set out to do comes in – one of the many things on my epic list of “to do in the next 15-16 days” – I need to leave time for proof-reading and binding!
• That it’s easy to forget to include things – e.g. lead-ins! (So obvious…and yet…)
• That just because *I* know what I mean, doesn’t necessarily make it clear to anybody else!
• That eventually materials design can take over your sleeping as well as your waking hours – I’ve started dreaming about them now…
• That it’s probably not a good sign when you come back to your teachers book after a while and it doesn’t make sense even to YOU who wrote it!
• That having people who are willing to look at what you’ve made and point out all the confusing bits and bits where improvements could be made (be it H or Sandy) is invaluable.
• That making even half-way good materials is hard… (But when they begin to take shape, so delightful!)

I’ve already gone through the whole gamut of emotions and probably will again before the deadline – I’m hugely inspired, buzzing with ideas, fed up, frustrated, tired, loving the creative process, wanting to bin the materials and start again, excited etc in turns. Mostly I keep wishing I had more *time* to spend on them. But I suspect there would never be enough time, however much time there were!

I had a very interesting time trialling some of my materials at work: Only a few activities, but seeing learners carry out the activities and interact with the materials gave me some useful pointers for little changes that needed making. The good news is, they were engaged by the activities! Unfortunately, though, as most of them left at the end of last week and I’m back on cover rather than having my own classes, I won’t be able to review the lesson and see how much stuck. But if any of the students who haven’t left happen to be in the classes I cover this week, I shall try to see what, if anything, they remember…

God knows what kind of mark I’ll come out with in the end, but my aim is to make my submission knowing that I’ve done my best. This means I’ve a lot to pull out of the bag in the next 18 days. (Amongst packing, moving flat, working and so on and so forth!) One more tutorial to go – I need to remember to ask all my remaining questions. I’m so good at forgetting to do that – getting carried away in the moment, listening to all the feedback…

Oh and finally,  you may wonder why I haven’t posted any of my dissertation materials on here thus far… The answer is, if I did that I’d be in danger of self-plagiarising! In any case, I may keep them under wraps for a while – I’m planning to submit a speaker proposal for IATEFL 2014, based on them. However, once I am deadline free, I will be digging out the materials I made for my materials development module (which theory-wise are based on the text-driven approach, the metacognitive approach and TBL), changing all the pictures to copy-right friendly ones (for the assignment they didn’t need to be because only our tutors were looking at them) and then hopefully putting them on here.

18 days…tick tock….

Image from Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository