Jan. 11th
1. Began the class with the questions and students did not really elaborate. They finished quickly and answered the questions. (Maybe I could have introduced an icebreaker before the session to get everyone comfortable and talking.)
2. In groups, students were hesitant to discuss. They wanted to answer using one word answers and some did not talk very much.
It seemed to me that they mostly discussed global objectives, such as learn about literature, whereas I thought they would come up with specific goals and objectives. (One thing that could help me with what is going on with the class is recording our class sessions. Then I can go back and review them. It is hard to remember everything.)
3. I gave them the outcomes for the unit and we discussed briefly why each one of those was important in general.
--character analysis--Do we do this? Yes, when we meet someone new; by observation
--format
--documentation
--English language
Then we discussed the product--the essay
Then we moved on to how we know we have accomplished this
So we set up evaluation criteria (see notes from student) and students began to ask questions about how to do something in particular (such as parenthetical citations) to which I responded, "That seems to be one of the tasks we need to work on."
(the students did seem reticent to admit that they did not know how to perform a certain task; perhaps after criteria have been established a task list can be worked on by the participants and I can survey them as to what skills they need to be able to accomplish their objective)
I skipped directly to begin outlining the tasks instead of aksing them to participate with me on determining what the task list for the unit should be
(I was kind of disappointed about this; that I naturally reverted back to my "teacher knows it" mode; I'm sure that better preparation of the research would help with this; the only problem is that I am learning as I am working on this and there are some things that I do not necessarily anticipate that i will work on; and doesn't participatory research mean that things will change depending on what the participants have to offer; I should have, though, had a general sense of what different things I needed to discuss and I forgot to include the task list)
I also have not asked the students to reflect and Spinuzzi argues that reflection is one of the most important parts of the research
I will ask students if they want to participate with the reflection/interviews.