Record of Observation or Review of Teaching Practice
Session/artefact to be observed/reviewed: group crit with MAIVM students – 12th March
Size of student group: 8
Observer: Andrea Machicao Francke
Observee: Emily Woolley
Note: This record is solely for exchanging developmental feedback between colleagues. Its reflective aspect informs PgCert and Fellowship assessment, but it is not an official evaluation of teaching and is not intended for other internal or legal applications such as probation or disciplinary action.
Part One
Observee to complete in brief and send to observer prior to the observation or review:
What is the context of this session/artefact within the curriculum?
A crit with 8 MA Illustration and Visual Media (IVM) students and one member of staff (me).
This crit will focus on work they have done for their Collaborative Unit (see appendix for unit info). The unit asks them to work collaboratively in groups in response to one of three set themes. Last week (w/c 3rd March) they had a pop-up show where they exhibited their outcomes for the unit.
How long have you been working with this group and in what capacity?
I am an HPL responsible for delivering workshops, tutorials and group crits. I have been working with this cohort since they joined the course in September 2024. Some of the students in this crit group are also in my tutee group meaning that I know them well, others I have had less contact with.
What are the intended or expected learning outcomes?
My line manager hasn’t given me firm guidelines for this crit; therefore, I can choose the intention.
As all the feedback sessions for this unit have been done in groups, I am hoping to use this crit to give students a chance to reflect on (through the process of sharing work) their individual experience of the unit and working collaboratively, specifically whether it has felt useful (or not!) and how they might take learning from it forwards through their personal practice (or not!).
What are the anticipated outputs (anything students will make/do)?
Students are expected to show current work (including but not limited to research, experiments or tests, material samples, maquettes, storyboards, sketchbooks etc., as well as more resolved outputs). As they have recently had a pop-up show it is likely that most will show final works or documentation from the exhibition.
If they are working physically/three-dimensionally they should present the material work. If they are showing research or digital work/moving image, then this can be presented digitally. They can also share documentation from the exhibition that they did as part of the unit.
Are there potential difficulties or specific areas of concern?
I find crits difficult for many reasons (I won’t rant here) and this one particularly so because it is the first time in the unit that students are being asked to centre their individual experience of the collaboration. I imagine that asking them to shift their perspective in this way will bring challenges.
Additionally, students are often quick to make judgments in crits about others’ work based on their interpretation of it. To help them move beyond this and sharpen their visual analysis skills, I encourage them to focus on what they can see (or if they insist on interpretation then to root it in the work in some way). The success of this approach depends on the willingness and maturity of the group. As this is my first crit with this cohort it is difficult to predict.
How will students be informed of the observation/review?
I have emailed the students to let them know about the observation and given them the option of opting out if they feel uncomfortable about being part of the review. I will also check in with them verbally on the day.
What would you particularly like feedback on?
For this crit I will trial a new approach and use Rosenberg’s practice of ‘observation without evaluating’ (text linked in appendix) as my framework. This intention is also outlined in my Case Study 1 (blog link in appendix).
My hope is that, within an art and design crit, promoting observing without evaluating could help students to give feedback about what they can see, rather than their interpretation of a work. Instead of relating through the dichotomy of understanding or not understanding, they would instead focus on what is visible; in other words, the formal elements of a work. This would go some way to mitigating the second challenge outlined above.
If you’re able to give feedback on this approach and its strengths/areas to improve I would be very grateful!
How will feedback be exchanged?
I am available in person and via email to discuss and exchange feedback.
Part Two
Observer to note down observations, suggestions and questions:
Points to pay attention:
Use of non-violent communication framework of observing, not evaluating.
First time presenting these works that were produced as a group individually.
Set-up
Before the session Emily sent out emails with the details of the session, an introduction of the crit as a pedagogical format, as well as suggestions on how students could use it. This was cohesive with a transparent pedagogical approach that permeated the whole session.
Emily arrived early and was very welcoming and warm to students as they came in. She also talked a bit informally about the studio and how to set it up to best accommodating the group opening windows and helping organise collectively cleaning the space together a bit, for example. She set up a neutral and welcoming space for everyone to gather and talk together before going to the spaces the individual students had set-up. There was a mix of students presenting, students just joining the crits as guests, and students using the studio. Emily was very welcoming to all of them. She started the session by inviting students to join her at the main table when they felt ready. The students were very warm towards her and vocalised that they had missed her in some of their last sessions. I’m assuming those were the sessions she missed because of her sick leave. The main example was a conversation about missing her because the work related to gendered or feminist perspectives, but Emily highlighted how this was maybe useful because it forced them to engage with the discomfort and potential confrontation with audiences that come from a different perspective. The maybe there was reflective of a pattern to how Emily was always very careful in avoiding an authoritative position and constantly articulate herself through doubt and uncertainty, opening up discussion instead of modelling judgment.
During the session.
Emily started on time but made it clear that late students would be welcomed in the group.
She asked everyone to disconnect from their screen unless using translation software or taking notes. It was clear that access issues are at the centre of her pedagogical practice, and she puts a lot of care in holding that space.
She introduced how the crit would function and was very transparent about the tension of the crit in relation to their recent group/individual experience. She framed the crit as an opportunity to talk not about the collaboration, which had been exhaustively reflected on, but how it supported them in their individual practices. She suggested a focus on one of their outputs because the collaborations were quite expansive and she wanted the conversations to have a grounding. She also made it clear that all of these were suggestions, and each student could define their own framework. She had asked students in the email to prepare a question for the group beforehand.
There was a 10min break for the students to reflect on their focus, framework, question and spend time with the outputs to prepare. Students took this time as an opportunity to set out their work and made some notes.
Emily used that time to also help clarify questions and support a student that arrived a bit late. This was a very gentle and discreet way to support students without calling attention to it.
Student 1
Emily guided the students in moving to the table with the work from the first student presenting. She set the framework to the crit, checking with the student, explained what observing without evaluating or interpreting would look like and suggested students to look at the selected object for a couple minutes.
Another student arrived during observation time. Emily softly by firmly highlighted the importance for being on time for group crits.
She encouraged students to move and use their bodies as part of the observing experience in relation an art object which was taken on and students moved around the table. It was clear that she made them aware of their bodies and their point of view in space.
Student 1 started by giving a bit of context to the work in relation to their group project on nostalgia and objects that have lost their functions in contemporary India in relation to her childhood. The student framed their crit question about how the materials and textures communicate nostalgia or failed to.
Emily was very attentive to students’ comments and gently pushed them to reflect on their choices of words and interpretations. She was very gentle and always phrased her questions and comments as point of curiosity for her, not a judgement on the word choices. She asked students to also bring in their knowledge from seeing the works in the exhibition space, before the student’s contextualisation.
Emily made sure the conversations were collective and repeatedly invited people to join the discussion whenever students’ attention showed signed of dispersing into individual conversations. There was some building work that was quite loud and again, Emily was quite effective in quickly addressing it and bringing the energy of the group back to the crit.
Emily used active listening and mirrored students’ articulations back to them, constantly checking if her rearticulation was precise and used it to enable a more in-depth reflection. She also was very transparent about what the crit was doing in pedagogical terms at different times, highlighting the group learnings as they were developing. She made sure to always referred back to the objects/images in the table and highlighted how what “what was visible” changed as the conversation proceeded.
The student was very joyful about some of the things they themselves “discovered “through the session. They also took opportunity to articulate how they worked as part of the group and what they understood about their individual practices as a result. Other students joined in to articulate how they addressed cohesion or difference in their groups. They mentioned the impact of working together in the same studio and Emily helped them articulate it in terms of understanding studio practice as a form of learning and working. They highlighted how it helped collaborations work in a more immediate, nurturing and process-based form. Emily focused on helping the student articulate how they would use the experience to move their work forward.
Student 2
As the group moved to the different setting, Emily reminded the students to take a few minutes to look and, in this case, hold and touch the objects, after asking the student if it was ok. The student started by flagging how all the pieces were collaborative in this case. She also highlighted different reactions to the works in the exhibition and how they were processing them. Emily was very attentive to student reactions and individual comments and used them to gently calling them into the discussion. Again, Emily repeated the active listening tactic of rearticulating and checking in, while at the same time highlighting points that could be interesting to explore forward.
A lot of the students seemed quite shy and hadn’t really participated in the discussions by this point, so Emily came out with some very direct descriptive questions that would require short answers which lowered the barriers to warm into joining the discussions. There were a few quite quiet students that seem to find it hard to participate in the discussion, probably an issue amplified by language barriers. Emily used her previous knowledge of the students to suggest to quieter students how their experience would help them to contribute to the discussion. She also kept connecting the current student with questions raised in the student 1discussion.
Emily was quite interested in getting students to articulate how different moments in their practice affected their work and always brought their attention to the materiality, the material choices, and the methodologies used in the work.
Student 2 had a very clear question: they enjoyed working with materials but it challenged her previous experience of focusing on storytelling as a comic artist, they wanted advice to how to move forward.
From the discussion it emerged how students felt they had been pressured in their previous educational experiences to have a concept and then develop it, while process-led research felt a more productive, natural and joyful way to lead their practices. Emily brought in her own experience at Goldsmiths of a concept-led education colling with her process-based practice and used that to exemplify how there are many different ways to structure one’s practice.
After:
The active listening / mirroring technique functioned quite effectively in helping the students to articulate themselves in a more sophisticated manner as well as to developing their attention and visual/material reading skills. Emily was very careful about modelling uncertainty and framing her questions or readings as tentative to be disagreed on, critique or built upon by the students. She used the active listening to gently challenge the assumptions under which certain positions that students might have been just repeating. There was an interesting circular/spiral structure to each of the discussions that never assumed something was solved or fully understood but took every new development as a chance to reassess something that has already been discussed. It reminded me of Lisa Baraitser’s work on Enduring or Unbecoming time, as an alternative to developmental time. I had never thought about it in relation to pedagogical time but it reinforce the idea of teaching as a nurturing and caring space, instead of an individualising and predetermined space.
Emliy was also very attentive to opening possibilities instead of closing down on judgments, that’s why the spiral as a structure for the crits came to mind. The group seemed quite wary of conceptualising or theorising the work or their decision-making processes, but the spiral form made those emerged naturally from the objects grounding the crits.
Emily was very attentive to the affects in the room and made sure that both sessions ended up in a high, with students feeling confident and invested in what was coming next. She was also very attentive to the embodied experience, suggesting moving and touching. She kept checking for energy levels and if students needed to sit down.
It’s hard for me to know how the observing vs. evaluating worked without having seen how this group has engaged with previous crits. I thought there was a lot of grounded evolution going on so my suspicion is that maybe what that method enabled was the spiral form and the collective holding of uncertainty.
Part Three
Andrea’s feedback is very helpful. Her framing of the “spiral model” and its relationship to “modelling doubt” (Mattern, 2024) is particularly generative. Key points for reflection are:
Using observing without evaluating and OBL (highlighted in yellow): The “observation without evaluating” (Rosenberg, 2005, pp. 25-35) approach enabled students to strengthen their visual analysis and locate evaluations in the work. Starting by explaining the approach helped, as did encouraging tactile engagement. For example, recommending students “move and use their bodies” and that they “hold and touch the objects”. This aligns with OBL, which promotes multi-sensorial learning. Andrea’s comment that students were “very joyful about some of the things they themselves “discovered” through the session” affirms they took agency over their learning. Joy and discovery are key facets of OBL, as Hardie (2015, p. 4) remarks “the ‘wow’ of an item can create rich, important and fun learning”.
It’s important to note that this approach did have to be continuously reinforced by referring “back to the objects/images” to highlight “how “what was visible” changed as the conversation proceeded”. Using this crit model consistently will help students learn to do this without prompting.
Navigating diverse student needs (highlighted in green): Andrea’s feedback has highlighted ways that I do this. I will continue to use these methods.
Supporting students to contribute verbally:
- “Emily came out with some very direct descriptive questions that would require short answers which lowered the barriers to warm into joining the discussions.”
- “Emily used her previous knowledge of the students to suggest to quieter students how their experience would help them to contribute to the discussion.”
Accommodating diverse physical needs:
- “She kept checking for energy levels and if students needed to sit down.”
Holding space for individual needs within the group dynamic:
- “There was a 10min break for the students to reflect . . Emily used that time to also help clarify questions and support a student that arrived a bit late. This was a very gentle and discreet way to support students without calling attention to it.”
Facilitating joy:
- “Emily was very attentive to the affects in the room and made sure that both sessions ended up in a high, with students feeling confident and invested”
The spiral crit and modelling uncertainty (highlighted in purple): Andrea has dubbed this crit model a “spiral” because there was a “circular/spiral structure to each of the discussions that never assumed something was solved or fully understood but took every new development as a chance to reassess something that has already been discussed”. This approach is informed by my Socratic teaching method (discussed in my microteaching review) and Rosenberg’s “observation without evaluating” (Rosenburg, 2005, pp. 25-35) (discussed in Case Study 1). As Andrea notes, what the latter has enabled is a “spiral form and the collective holding of uncertainty”. Benefits include “opening possibilities instead of closing down on judgments’ and helping students ‘conceptualising or theorising the work or their decision-making processes”.
To unpick this further and explore possible applications Andrea and I are talking via WhatsApp (screen shots attached with permission) and plan to meet soon. She has also kindly shared literature (linked in her feedback) with me.
I want to highlight the cumulative learning this evaluation has enabled by embedding and extending ideas from my microteaching and case studies (1 & 2), as well as course texts.
References:
Hardie, K. (2015) Innovative pedagogies series: Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching, Higher Education Academy. Available at: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/kirsten_hardie_final_1568037367.pdf (Accessed: 10th March 2025)
Mattern, S. (2024) ‘Modeling doubt: a speculative syllabus’ in Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 22/Issue 2 (2024), Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14704129231184553 (Accessed 13th March 2025).
Rosenberg, M.B. (2005) ‘Observing without evaluating’, in Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. 2nd ed. Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press, pp. 25-35
Appendix:
Information about the Collaborative Unit:
Collaborative Unit assignment brief
Collaborative Unit briefing slides
Observation without Evaluating:
Rosenberg’s text can be found here
My Base Study 1 blog post is here
Students have been sent this email ahead of time:
Hi everyone,
I hope you’re well.
First of all – congratulations on the pop-up show! It was a really dynamic exhibition that showcased your hard work and innovative approach to collaborative practice. Well done!
I’m emailing with some information ahead of this week’s crit.
The crit will take place in T1001 from 2 – 5 pm on Wednesday 12th March.
What is a crit?
A crit is a session where you share work (which could include research, experiments or tests, material samples, maquettes, storyboards, sketchbooks etc., as well as more resolved outputs) with a group of peers and staff. The group then offers you conversation, feedback and insights.
The word ‘crit’ is short for ‘critique’ which means to evaluate something in a detailed and analytical way. During a crit the aim is not to be unduly critical but to reflect on and discuss how and why someone is doing/exploring/making something and what this means. To critique is to be compassionate, interrogative and empathetic and to both actively listen and contribute to the group dynamic.
What will we do in our crit on Wednesday 12th March?
On Wednesday you will be asked to present something from your collaborative project. During the Collaborative Unit most feedback sessions were done in groups, this is an opportunity for you to share and reflect on your role within and experience of the collaboration and how it feeds into and informs your personal practice – or how it doesn’t!
If you are working materially, try and bring the physical thing. You could also consider sharing documentation of your work installed in the recent pop-up show.
You will each have around 20 minutes to show your work and participate in a discussion about it. To guide this discussion please prepare two questions for the group. This will help ensure that the conversation is useful to you.
Also! I am currently doing a teaching qualification called a PgCert. As part of this qualification another teacher has to observe me working so that they can offer me feedback on my teaching style and methods. On Wednesday, a teacher called Andrea will observe me facilitating the crit. She will not participate in the discussion, she will only observe. Please note that she is not observing you, she is only observing me.
If you are comfortable with her being there it will be very helpful for me. If you are not comfortable with this please let me know by emailing me directly.
Let me know if you have any questions and I look forward to seeing you all this Wednesday!
Emily