Planning Our Group Teach---> Our Meetings So Far

Our group is the first to go! I hope you guys are excited!

Dr. Mortimore-Smith has given up the broad topic of Multiculturalism and Racial Identity. We were having trouble at first coming up with the focus of our topic. We had our first meeting a while ago in the English Resource Room in Horton Hall. It was a great place to meet. We had books at our finger tips and breakfast! I believe my best ideas come to mind when I am snacking. Haha. Each person in my group wrote down ideas we mentioned in our meeting. This was a great idea because we were certain that all of our ideas were recorded. Then we went on to discuss the different texts that we wanted to incorporate into the lesson. The problem there was our activities were not specific to the content of the literature we choose to pick. So, we slowed down. We said, "Okay we will be doing three lessons, so lets figure out what eat lesson will be about." I do not want to spoil it for the class on some of the things we will be doing, but lets just say that once we made a "template" our ideas were able to go in a direction instead of just up in the air. We met for about an hour and a half or two hours I would say. It was a great meeting to get ideas flowing, but many of us were not sure what to bring to the meeting because we did not even really focus on a topic yet. Our plan in doing this was that we wanted each person to find something in the broad topic that may be useful and bring it to the first lesson. Arlen brought in some great scholarly articles. I brought American Born Chinese and To Kill a Mockingbird. Travis brought up a book he once read from the perspective of a child with autism. Nicole and Bethany searched on their computers for other literary texts or poems. If I had to give our group a progress grade after the first meeting I would say we got a B. I say this because I think we completed a lot more in a second meeting.

Our second meeting was discussed at the end of the first one. We planned on meeting together right after our night class. We believed this was a good idea because Dr. Mortimore-Smith gave us a lot of in class time to discuss aspects of our project and we wanted to keep these ideas flowing into our meeting. Sometimes group meetings start out kind of slow. No one wants to take another group member's idea or there is no direction in the conversation. Our meeting lasted from 9:00pm after class until I think about 10:30pm. We first talked at the table, then decided to project Nicole's laptop onto the overhead. Each person questioned text that we decided on and we were able to eliminate some, but also stumble on to one that we felt fit great. We figured out all of the homework that we wished to assign. Trust me, it will be fun! Then we worked on our essential questions and goals. Travis volunteered to figure out how to apply this to our standards. I liked working in my group in both of our meetings because each person is extremely committed to the discussed and work. All five of us are very passion about English and are excited to be teaching this lesson. I also wanted to mention that I felt at easy in our group meetings because we were not worried about "time." We choose to meet at a time where were did not have a true time limit. Having only an hour to work as a group really puts the pressure on the members to come up with great ideas quick. I will admit sometimes we did get side tracked, but this freedom allowed us to stumble onto something great. At the end of our meeting we assigned each person to a particular lesson theme or activity.

We will begin on the "paperwork" very shortly after our meeting with Dr. Mortimore-Smith on Monday. We will be discussing with her our concrete ideas and then proceed to polish everything up.

To Be Continued...