Ever since we ended the training phase on Thursday afternoon, the
suspense has been sort of building, as we wondered who would actually turn up for
the word-collection portion of the workshop. One of our biggest concerns has
been regarding the Group Leaders, several of whom did not attend the training.
Past experience has indicated that those who do not attend the training do not
do well when asked to lead a word-collection group. So we planned a catch-up
session on Saturday and invited four people to attend. However, no one came. So
there was quite a bit of discussion and creative thinking over the weekend to
try to figure out how to move ahead with the actual word collection in the most
productive way.
But we still didn’t know who would actually come today. Would all of
those who were trained come? We certainly hoped so and prayed that they would!
Would some of those who had missed both the regular training session last week
and the impromptu one on Saturday come today? We weren’t sure. As I mentioned,
the suspense was building.
What happened in the end took us rather by surprise. With us focusing
our concern on the seemingly inadequate number of Group Leaders and wondering
whether those who had been trained would come or not, we were not prepared for
the fact that none of the people who were invited to attend without having the
training showed up! (We generally invite about 15 speakers of the language who
need no other qualification other than that they speak the language fluently,
and none of those who had been invited in this capacity showed up by the time
we were ready to begin!)
This had never happened in any of the workshops I’ve led previously, so
David and I put our heads together—because one of my roles as RWC workshop
consultant is to give advice for dealing with the unexpected when doing one of
these workshops—and came up with a plan. We would use the Glossers and Typists
to fill in for the missing people, hoping that those others would show up late
instead of not at all. So, following a fairly short Opening Ceremony, those in
attendance were divided up into five groups comprised primarily of a Group
Leader, a Scribe, a Glosser, and a Typist. And we began to collect words.
As time went by, a few more people did come, but we decided to stick
with the five groups we had going, just adding the new arrivals to one group or
another. Productivity for the day ended up being on the low end of the
acceptable range, which was better than we were expecting, quite frankly. 855
words were collected on this first day of the workshop. The first day for other
workshops I’ve facilitated has resulted in anywhere from 700 to 1100 words, I
would say. So 855 seems quite acceptable, considering the challenges that we were
working to overcome, and especially considering the fact that we had only five
groups collecting words instead of the usual six.
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| Results from the first day of word collection |
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