Week 1-2: Key Questions

We started off this semester with a split discussion (meaning the class was in three different groups) about key questions we need to address as a group for our upcoming conference. As anyone can imagine, how do you get 30 people to agree on thing? Well, it probably won’t happen, so you have to put it up to a vote, or in our case survey.

Our group ended up being the biggest group I think, due to a miscommunication, which caused a lot of thoughts and ideas to be thrown out. To recap them all now, would take nearly as long as the discussion took. In reading back through the discussion, I was struck by how everyone seemed to be on the same page for the most part and when they weren’t they were respectful. I guess sometimes I’m amazed to work with adults, they are such a long way from high schoolers. J I did find a few people to be rude with there responses and it made it hard for me to participate….what if I screwed up?

Although it got lost along the way, I think my best contribution was:

I want to be sure though that we don’t make this decision on OUR needs, we will have conference participants and our decisions should be based on THEIR needs and how to structure it so that THEY get the most out of the conference.

I think this redirected the group for a little bit, but eventually and even outside out “discussion” group and into our class, I think we forget that it’s not all about us, we are not in competition with each other; It’s about them (conference participants) and we need to look and act like one cohesive group.

I think the key person in our discussion this week was Stephanie. I know she is a bit self-conscience about it, but had we not had someone who took the reigns so early and got us started, I don’t know if we would have gotten as much out of the discussion. Her efforts of asking questions and keeping “peace” among the group should never be overlooked.

Although, I felt a bunch of people deserve the recognition of helping the group discussion, my next person is Richard Stewart. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but there were several comments that stood out as important that he was responsible for. The biggest being:

Along these same lines, is there a general course format that we should all be using? Are there specific questions we should all address as part of the conference? “How does such-and-such-a-topic help learners….?....?....?” Should all sessions be focusing on the same aspect of education and how their topic gets at these aspects?

I thought this was a really important idea that didn't get discussed quite as much as it should have been, but again, it brought the conference attendees to the forefront, where they should be.