Yukiko Ishikawa

The 49th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Association of Educational Psychology was held in Saitama on September 15-17. At the conference, Drs. Roger and David Johnson gave a workshop and a keynote lecture on the first day. I attended both of them. The most impressive thing was their amazing teamwork. They seemed to know every word the other would say next and know exactly when to switch the role (and it’s not like 5 minutes each, sometime one or two sentences each!). It was truly “cooperative”.

I also enjoyed working together with other audiences. Actively participating (not just listening) was expected in those workshops, as I had experienced some workshops on Cooperative Learning before. However, I was surprised when they actually made the audience work together in the keynote lecture. It was in a huge lecture hall with hundreds of audience. And the lecture on Social Interdependence Theory was truly intellectually challenging. I “experienced” that lectures can be interactive, not necessarily “speaker talks, audience listens” (and it’s usually sleepy!).

At work, I have opportunities to give workshops to university students from time to time. The students are so used to sleepy lectures in a big classroom. To keep them awake (well, for them to learn better), I became more motivated to work harder to make my workshops and classes interactive and engaging like Drs. Johnson showed us.