Presenting

I think presenting on Wednesday was important for our group as a whole. While we have all worked hard in previous PA sessions, organizing our research and presenting it to others groups seemed to give us more of a sense of purpose. It helped me and I think my team formulate an end goal for our PA experience.
Our presentation consisted of four parts each of us were responsible for one piece. Or goal was to share where we are in the PA process and how what we have done will lead us towards a finished project. Patrick shared a very well thought out journal entry that summarized why smoking prevention and awareness is important in our community. He shared some shocking statistics which really explained why our topic is important and was able to communicate his concern in his own voice. It was cool. Jyree "the documentarian" shared our video in its initial stages. It's pretty choppy and will need a lot of work but I just introduced the video program two weeks ago. I'm excited for the students to learn how to edit video and figure out how to interview eachother on camera. It gives us a tool to help reflect on our process. Michael shared some interview questions we have developed as a group about the pressures of smoking that kids face. It looks like the target for these questions has become a professional athelete. We will see what this leads to for our project...  

Getting the Gang Back Together

It was nice to have the the whole group back together for our PA session. Last week one member, just before PA began ended up punching a kid in his class. He ended up getting suspended and was obviously not allowed to attend tour session. The week prior I was out sick. It really helps to have everyone present for the group to truly be successful as a unit.

We went over our roles( documentarian, task master, data keeper and reader) for the week and journaled about the responsibilities our individual roles had. I guess It wasn't clear but in my action research question but we do rotate the roles from week to week. I think journaling is a nice way to start because it helps get the focus back into PA. I think next week however I might switch our opening activity into a game or an icebreaker since we have all journaled about each of the roles. Doing some more kinesthetic activities could be beneficial to the whole PA session as well. I think this will also be good after missing PA over spring break.

The rest of our session went pretty well. We finished doing our research questions and everyone participated in their roles. I was trying to let the kids have more of a lead in doing their own research they worked hard and it was nice to see. I am still stuggling with the different learning abilities in our group. Multiple times things were left up to one student "because he's smart". However, I felt as long as everyone was participating in their roles, everyone was learing a piece of group work.

After finishing research we brainstormed a list of questions that we would like to ask a professional about smoking awareness and prevention. Everyone participated and it went smoothly. The one big success of the day was learning that we could answer a lot of our own question by refering to the research we had done. We tried to develop a list of questions that would give us new information rather than repeating things we had already learned.

Smoking Ads

Action Research

I recently introduced a list of roles for our group to discuss. The four roles we deemed most important for our group to be successful were; a documentarian, a task master, a data keeper and a reader. We begin each day discussing how we can be cooperative in our roles, however, I can already see that some roles are more desirable than others. The question I pose is,

Will the weekly delegation of roles help our group work as a cohesive unit or does it limit the chance for a synergetic group effort?