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MIT: HopemongersSeminarSpring 2006This quarter you will facilitate and organize your own seminar groups. Through this work, you have the opportunity to continue examining and practicing the skills involved in effectively and productively working as professional colleagues. In addition you will practice the skills involved in consciously supporting the development of collaborative group work, be it among colleagues or among your future students. Identify goals and guidelines for seminar groupsAn important step in setting up your work this quarter will be for your group to clarify your specific goals for seminar discussions on texts, and to develop some guidelines to help you meet those goals. (Should I state these goals upfront? Am I frontloading something that I should let them determine? --Among the goals for seminar discussions are: (i) unpacking, considering, and applying ideas from the texts as resources; (ii) examining what makes the ideas convincing; (iii) wondering what the implications of the argument are for student learning, teaching and schooling; (iv) considering how the text speaks to arguments that you are learning about in other parts of the program; and (v) considering who would or wouldn’t benefit from the implications of the perspective, argument or practice. ) Seminar preparation & synthesis of discussionYou will continue to do seminar preparations though your group will decide on the form that they will take. At the end of each seminar, your group will take 15-20 minutes to write up a synthesis of your discussion, realizations came to, interesting disagreements and questions. Dropthis synthesis at faculty offices at the end of the day.Develop skills in facilitating and developing collaborative group workThree times over the course of the quarter, you will work with 1-2 others in your group to identify a skill builder from Cohen’s Designing Groupwork that would help your group reflect in a useful way about some aspect of its work together (see chapters 3-4, and appendix A). You will also use these exercises to begin thinking about what’s involved in developing your students’group work skills and how you might use exercises such as these with your future students. Thisexercise plus discussion should take no longer than 20 minutes of your seminar time. Specifically:1. Do skill builder (10 minutes)2. Lead a brief discussion of the experience and how the skill is at work in your seminar group discussions.3. Plan and build in a way to purposefully integrate use of that skill as part of the process of seminar discussion that week.4. Write up a reflection that outlines: (i) What skill you wanted the group to work on and why.(ii) Which skill builder you used.(iii) What you noticed about using the skill builder (e.g. how did your colleagueswork with the skill as part of the discussion that week?) (iv)How you envision using this skill builder such as this as part of your work with your future students? What are questions that skill builders such as this raise for you?IN CLASSWeek one: Identify goals, guidelines and form of seminar preparation for your group work. 1. Identify and clarify what your group members hope to accomplish through theseseminar discussions on the program texts. What will a useful/engaging seminar look like and involve? 2. Make a decision about how you will prepare for these weekly discussions in a substantive and useful way given the goals you identified. Could be one of the following: visual map or paper outlining major arguments, supports and questions for discussions, or some other equivalent level of preparation. Note: simply reading, jotting down questions is not sufficient preparation. 3. Develop and agree on set of written guidelines/expectations for how you plan toproductively and constructively work together towards the goals you identified above. (Should I recommend rotating facilitators? Or should we leave it up to them to bump into the need? The 3 skillbuilder exercises will require somebody to take the lead of seminar. I could recommend that in those weeks the skillbuilder developers facilitate seminar. )4. Make a plan for how and when, over the course of the quarter, you plan to examine: (i) how well you are meeting your goals; (ii) how well you are working with the guidelines, (iii) how well the guidelines are serving your group and (iv) whether you need to add/adapt anything to help your group meet its goals? Identify 1-2 people who will take on the responsibility of leading yourgroup in assessing its work.5. Identify three other sets of people to do the skillbuilders. Determine in which weeks you plan to run these exercises. Hand in a copy of the goals, guidelines and form of seminar preparation your group has decided on. Include a copy of your plan for assessing the work and who is taking the lead in facilitating that work. Also identify the three sets of people who are going to lead the skill building exercises.For the curriculum project, can one of the elements be that they use Cohen chapter 5-9 to develop a group


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EVERGREEN MIT 2007 - Seminar

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