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.