First of all, I want to thank all of you for actively participating in my presentation activities tonight. I realize that by the end of class everyone is tired and wants to go home, so your enthusiasm was much appreciated and really helped me to conquer my nerves.
Now, I’m going to ask some specific questions that I hope you will answer in order for me to learn as much as possible from this experience.
1) Pre-writing activity – When planning this lesson, I had mulled over the idea of assigning students a pre-writing activity before giving them the story to read. The idea I had was to ask students to create a pamphlet, telling them that it would need to be something that they felt could make a positive difference in people’s lives. The purpose of this would be to have them approach the story with an understanding of just how difficult that task would be. Hopefully it would help them identify with the narrator and her struggles. However, I wasn’t sure if this activity would be age-appropriate for college students. Would it? If not, do you have any other pre-writing activities I could use with this story?
2) I posted six prompting questions to generate responses (3 for each part of the story), can you think of any that would have been more productive?
3) What did you think of the technique of breaking the story up into two sections? Did it help with your understanding of the text?
4) Timing – I planned two days for this text and the activities. Is that enough time? Too much?
5) Choice of Text – Do you think “The Pamphleteer” is an effective story for achieving the three objectives I had? For a refresher, those objectives were:
- to practice literary interpretation through written reflection and group discussion
- to establish a classroom environment that fosters group discussion and collaborative learning, and
- to evaluate my students’ critical reading and interpretation skills.
6) Written assignments – Were they okay? Do you have any other suggestions?
If you have something to say about anything not covered in the above questions, please say it. I am impressed with the amount of practical knowledge and experience you all have and look forward to hearing your ideas/comments/criticisms.