Teamwork

I feel like we accomplished a lot as a group this week. Last week was tough, I had two students who were arguing about sharing a computer and working together, one of them actually ended up leaving the room. So this week I thought it would be important to start our time together talking about team work and cooperation.

We started off our PA session by delegating roles. We had a documentarian, a task master, a data keeper and a reader. For our first activity we thought about how we could be cooperative in our roles. I drew up a poster with different questions on it like; what does it look like to be cooperative? What does it sound like etc...? I wanted to keep them interested and moving so we took turns rotating at different stations to write or draw our answers to the questions.

The roles went over well, I think it brought them into our project and gave them a sense of responsibility. I was the reader, the documentarian was using my phone to record our activities, the data keeper had the "master copy" of our research questions and the task master had a timer to keep us on track. Everyone took their roles seriously and that was fun to see.

After we had our roles figured out we moved into the research phase. We tried this last week but we were rather unsuccessful and disorganized. This week it helped to work in a group rather than individually. I made a list of research questions that correlated to specific websites that I had posted on my blog. This worked well, last week the group had to type in web addresses which became complicated and frustrating. We ended up getting some good background into the physical financial and emotional costs of tobacco in our society and the students were impressive in their roles. I look forward to next week and developing roles in our group. It would be great to see them take charge of the project eventually.