Friday, March 6, 2009
Group Projects
I guess I don't understand the point of blogging on something that we're going to be presenting tp the class anyways, so i 'd like to take the opportunity to discuss group presentations in general. Does anyone else find the process of putting together a group presentaiton somewhat akward? In my experience its usually only a superficial collaborative effort. You get together and discuss what everyone's roles will be, and then you seperate and do your own thing. Its alawys difficult to asses the outcome of such an effort. It usually turns into a group of seperate presentaions, loosely held together by the subject matter. How do you create a true group project? It sometimes feels as though the presentation needs to be constructed from start to finish, with all group members present. I would like to add that this isn't a dig at the members of my group, and that I'm just looking for suggestions. Perhaps I'm oversimplifying or overthinking it.
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I am with you cory. I am frustrated with all of the group projects that I am assigned right now. It's not to say that they aren't important or useful, I just think there is overkill in this program. I like how you called them "superficial collaborative efforts", that hits the nail on the head. I will say the same thing I said last week...WHEN CAN WE JUST TEACH ALREADY??!!
ReplyDeleteI too feel that group projects/presentations resort to let's each take a task, work on it, then get together and combine everything into the final outcome. There have been those rare, precious times when I have been fortunate enough to be involved in a group where we were lucky in that we could meet together multiple times, but that was when everyone was able to somehow meet at the same time. Unfortuantely, that is not always the case as we all have our crazy lives and priorities to attend to, but the presentation still manages to be successful.
ReplyDeleteAs to Andrew feeling like there are too many group projects being thrown at us, it can feel like that. But from what I've taken from my other classes, it seems that what they are trying to encourage is that once we are teaching in a school, we will be having to work with a variety of teachers. We will have to communicate with one another to find out what our students are learning in their other classes and use that to build onto our curriculum. I think I can even recall one of my professors saying that one of the worst things to happen in schools was when teachers would just shut their doors and close themselves off from the other teachers, because it affected what the students were getting (or essentially not getting) out of their overall education. And, it can help encourage teachers to communicate with one another as to student performance, personal issues, and so on.