Tuesday: project day 2
Today I held job meetings with the team managers and with the photo journalists (in that order). While these went on, the other students began information gathering to prepare for their meetings to be held the next day.
Team Manager Meeting
My agenda: These students were shown a sample poster (I made it about cubic functions so I could show all the components without giving any answers away) and provided with a handout listing the minimum requirements for the poster. I also went through the calendar with them in more detail clarifying dates and timing more specifically than the events already printed on the calendar. Lastly, we discussed what to do if other team members are absent, having difficulty, or being resistant to completing their tasks.
How it went: Great! I am so impressed with these students! They demonstrated great maturity, thoroughness and really took their managerial roles seriously. When the meeting ended they went back to their groups and shared out about the poster requirements and went through the calendar with their team members.
Photo Journalist Meeting
My agenda: I showed the Journalists the same sample poster the managers saw but this time we used it as a sample to critique. I asked students to identify ways it could be improved and how those improvements could be made. I provided a copy of Chip Kidd's design book so students could browse ideas about visual design. We also started Google Photo album creation and talked about how to add photos with captions and guidelines for how many photos should be taken. Lastly, we talked about available technology for QR code creation and other related issues.
How it went: These meetings went well but there were some inconsistencies across my classes. The differences were largely in the section of the meeting for critiquing the sample poster. Some classes, the Journalists did a great job discussing and participating, other classes needed a good amount of prompting to cover the content I had hoped they would discuss, and one class really struggled.
I really liked the order and length of the meetings. Holding the manager meeting first gave the other team members more clear goals without me needing to talk to the whole class at once. The only disadvantage of not talking to the photo journalists sooner is that some didn't start taking pictures until after the meeting. That would be easy to address by making a point to have them start photographing their team day one.
If you noticed but I skipped day one, you're right. The day of the kickoff and introduction was so hectic for me that I forgot to update and didn't realize until this post was already written. The kick off went well. Students received jobs and groups smoothly. I'm glad about that and think the large amount of time spent on assigning jobs and groups really paid off. Teams saw an overview of a wooden cone with pull-apart cross sections and eventually drew conic names at random. The calendar overview and all the activities on day one used the class period effectively (48 min).
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