Group Unit Thoughts

      When we were introduced to the idea of a group unit, I was skeptical and wondering how it would all work out.  I like working on a project in groups because we can bounce ideas off each other and get different ideas that we may not have thought about individually. The thing that bothers me is how we must show who did what for every part of the lesson.  A lot of our ideas were collaboratively generated during our group’s discussions, who gets the credit for those ideas? According to Google docs, it is the person who typed them.  But in reality we all deserve the credit.  I find that this way of evaluating who did what will push us to work more individually rather than collaboratively because we will be trying to stake claim to original ideas.  Maybe a more effective way of evaluating participation would be to have us individually evaluate our group members at the end of the semester on criteria such as 1. Contribution, 2. Willingness to help, 3) Communication with group members ect…

At first, I was not sure how it would work being placed in a group with Science or Spanish content areas.  But this cross-disciplinary lesson planning with a Spanish content area on the topic of US/Cuba relations has been working great.   We have not had to do anything like this in our other classes as we have always been placed within our content areas.  I like being challenged to think
across disciplines because this is becoming increasingly more prevalent in today’s schools.

One idea I have to involve the community in the classroom would occur in lesson three.  Within this lesson is the topic of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Students will interview a relative about their experiences during this time.  Such questions could include “What did you think when you first heard Kennedy’s speech about nuclear missiles being deployed in Cuba?” “What was life like during these thirteen days of uncertainty when the country was at the brink of nuclear war, what were your feelings?” “What were your opinions about the decisions the US made?”  “How do you remember the media covering this event?”  Students will share their completed interviews with their classmates. This will gives students a sense of what it was like living during this historical period.  It will help them
relate to this event knowing that their relatives experienced it.