Student Teaching Week of 9/13/13

As of this week I now have five classes I am teaching; three sections of sophomore and two of freshmen.  We are doing some interesting projects in both courses.  The sophomore are covering characterization and are currently drafting character sketches.  I'm not going to get into all the gritty details of this project, but it begins with what is called a 'Mystery Person' activity.  With this activity the students work in groups to pull items from bags and identify information about the person who would own such items.  The information might include age, gender, family, work, religion, etc.  The students seemed to really enjoy the activity, and seem to be gaining a good understanding of characterization and character types as they progress through the project.

I find that the challenge with this activity is making sure the students are not stereotyping with their characters.  The initial stages of this project have a definite degree of stereotyping involved.  For example, in one bag the items included cooking supplies.  I noticed many male dominated groups said the character must be a woman, because they feel women cook more than men.  During the activity I did my best to move around the room and ask the groups questions which challenged such ideas.

My freshmen just finished reading "The Most Dangerous Game" and are currently working in groups to create setting maps of Ship Trap Island, the fictitious island from the story.  They must identify passages from the text which describe setting and then use such passages to create their maps. 

I find group activities to be a challenge.  I used to think that group work made a teacher's life easier as it is more student centered learning.  The reality is this is not the case.  It is very easy for students to get off task when working in groups.  To correct this I have been trying a number of strategies.  I'll just explain one here.  If the entire class seems to be getting off track instead of running around the room and telling each group they need to get back to work, I will typically stop the whole class and announce what I'm seeing done wrong.  I won't call out individual groups, but I will explain that such behavior is unacceptable and set a clear expectation for what I want corrected.  So far this seems to work.