Kellie, Emily, and I had a wonderful, crazy week putting together our first group presentation on Methods for Closure and Evaluation. Our groups for this assignment were put together just as we were about to go out the door during our last class. Kellie, Emily and I quickly traded email information and acknowledged that we all were booked up for a few days. We left class, somewhat apprehensive about how we were going to pull this together. Amazingly, putting together the 20 minute presentation on Closure and Evaluation using Direct Instruction worked better than I expected. It was obvious during the short days that we worked together that my two partners were completely invested in putting some strong effort into creating a presentation that was informative and engaging. Flexibility, peer support and dialog strengthened our end product, as well as our entire experience. This was definitely an example of how the three of us working together were able to create a better product than if each of us had worked separately and later put it together.
This is again a lesson I would like to bring to my classroom, not only the ability to work together, but to do it so that the end product benefits from a collaborative environment. This would involve learning to listen and to speak up, to look for and use the strengths of each of your teammates, and to support and constructively critique each other.
Your group did a great job on your presentation. I really liked your anticipatory set and grabber (asking about things we've opened today). I think the closure part of a lesson is the part that many people forget about. You need to bring the lesson to a close, through review, etc. It's too easy when you're running short on time, especially at the secondary level, to just say well we're out of time, see you tomorrow. Every lesson needs to be wrapped up.
ReplyDelete-Kelly