Cooperative learning assessment
Greetings,
Today was my first serious observation of the Peacebloom High School with Miss Silverleaf. Out of the many things that I took note of, I would like to take notice of an assignment that Miss Silverleaf started in one of her classes.
Essentially she broke the class into two groups of roughly equal sizes, and assigned one with being “anti-imperialist” and the other being “imperialist.” She provided the groups with one article pertaining to each side had them read that article. Tomorrow she stated that she would have the groups meet and discuss their “point of view” and then they would have to chose a spokesperson to explain their point of view to the class as a whole.
While an excellent idea to begin with, I don’t think that this would go far enough in forcing intellectual stimulation that Miss Silverleaf would hope to get out of this.
Before that particular section of her US history class, we discussed the idea of behind the lesson. She hoped that the students would “get into it” and hopefully start a debate. Indeed, on the assignment board, she labeled it as a “debate”. However, with the instructions that she gave the students, I do not this sort of debate that she and I hoped for would materialize.
I do wish I could be there tomorrow, to see how she reacts and prompts the students to debate the issues. I will be sure to ask her on Thursday, when I come in again, how it went, and to try to debrief her on what she thought went wrong.
I would propose that a better way to promote the debate would be to turn this into more of a project than another assignment. Indeed, telling them that I would expect them to role play their imperialist or anti-imperialist roles and perhaps attempt to break them into smaller groups for more effective classroom management would be, I think, more appropriate.
Indeed, as I have said, rather than in earlier works of this edublog, I intend to make this more of my own musings, what I can use, what I don’t want to, what I can improve in the world around me. I also intend to post things that I see as important stepping stones in my transformation from a student to a teacher. This idea has a great deal of merit, I just believe I would run it differently.
October 13th, 2006 at 9:31 am
Greetings,
I spoke with Miss Silverleaf on my last observation regarding the activity above. She stated that although the hour in which I observe did acceptably well, the following hour did even better. I asked her what she would do differently to improve results. She stated that she would have used smaller groups to start with, and then constructed the debate using 4 speakers, 2 anti-imperialist, 2 imperialist. I concurred, as I figure this would also allow for more effective classroom management.