Authenticity and Improvements

As the students finish up their tri-fold displays this week, the thing that I see missing from their presentations is some interactions with real people in real careers. All of the information they have gathered is from books and online resources. Earlier in the unit, each student did interview someone about their job but that was before we chose which personality career they were going to focus on. I did hear two groups talk about interviewing a few people and showing their video for their interactive presentation - but that never happened. I did show the Artistic group videos from Unitedstreaming.com but they ended up not using them either.

I ended up being gone when the students were working on the career resumes and did not get a chance to teach some of the Word skills that I wanted them to use: paragraph format, indents and styles. We ran out of time and I cut the portfolio activity from the assignment.

If I do this unit again next semester, here are some of the things that I would change:

1. Invite guest speakers to class
2. Wait and have the students conduct the interview with someone in their field after they have chosen their topic.
3. Show some of the unitedstreaming videos earlier in the unit.
4. Have them use the "Best Jobs of the 21st Century" book for data for Excel project because some of the research took too long.
5. Walk them through the first Excel assignment and check for understanding as we go along.
6. I would wait and do this unit at the end of the semester when the students have more technology skills available to them.

Teaching skills and embracing a constructivist view

Today I was feeling a little uneasy about giving up my formal sequence of lessons of "how to do <insert skill here>. I am trying to embrace more of a constructivist approach in my lessons and allow the students to discover the information as needed. My tendancy to teach them everything they need to know about, for example, indents - unfortunately, this showed up in my lesson today.

I have created a wiki to list the Word skills as we use them in projects, and give students references to pages of my former textbook to access for additional help but today I found myself going back to my old ways and conducting a lesson on "the 5 different types of indents". Why was I doing this? Was there a need to learn indents or did one of the activities require the students to learn what the indent markers on the Word screen??? NO! It was me and my controlling behavior that showed up instead. Its great to point out a few things to help students to make their lists, or citations easier to read - but I taught the skill just for the sake of teaching the skill - the exact thing I didn't want to do in this Unit.

So, part of this ARP is for me - to help me change my behavior and trust that when the students have a need to learn indents, I can take that time and turn it into a "teachable moment" and the students will be more engaged because they have a need to learn that skill.