WEEK ONE, DAY THREE

To start day three we did a short ice breaker that I learned in one of my college classes called the Desert Survival guide. It’s a teamwork activity that is designed to encourage group interaction and synergy. Essentially the students just all create individual rankings for a list of items they have in the middle of the desert after being stranded by a plane crash. The kids then come back and work as a team to develop group rankings. Both individual and group are compared to the expert rankings, and then we see if they achieved synergy by getting a better group score. This activity leads into our comfort with sharing, power of working in a group, and imitation. However, with two kids, it ended up not being as effective as planned.

Next, we shared a couple stories with the students from a blog post titled five lessons to being a better person. The point of this activity was to show them how to use emotion to make stories powerful. We followed this up with “make your momma cry”, an activity we designed to help students access the power of emotion in storytelling and writing. The goal is simply to write a piece or story that would make your mother or any other person cry. We continued to hammer home our point about the unexpected being the most powerful thing you can use to make someone feel emotion about anything.

The students were really responsive to this idea. The stories weren’t necessarily as powerful as they could have been but they really grasped the concept that the unexpected is what draws emotion from people.

We transitioned from storytelling into our public speaking/presentation model. We broke down presentations into four separate parts: The hook, keeping the audience engaged, conveying information, and ending. Through these four different points, we analyzed a couple TED talks bit by bit and discussed how each of the speakers used these different techniques. The students then started developing their own presentation about parkour. Due to the limited time and the small number of students, we had them just do a group presentation. The remainder of the day was spent preparing and then presenting to end it.

Thoughts on the day and week:

•      We feel that we need to emphasize the idea of self-direction more on the first couple days. It’s our mission and in order for the kids to take ownership they need to understand why they have control.

•       One of the problems is that the kids don’t seem to want to be doing the research and don’t seem like they want to be creating the presentation, even though it’s about something they love.

•       We feel that on the first day, we didn’t create the sense that they needed to be choosing everything that they learn and that they have ownership in it.

•       WE CRAVE STRUCTURE. Students are so inclined to want structure in any environment. It’s an uncomfortable thing to have to be completely free and do whatever you want while still in an educational frame. The kids naturally want to do nothing to do with school when we give them freedom. How can we create a desire to learn/make a presentation about something they love? We think that starting at the beginning and laying down solid framework of what self-direction is and how this week will operate (more macro ideas) will allow that to happen.

•       Definitely having more time to develop the presentation is important. Next week we want to combine our different activities with the presentation so they are simultaneously developing skills and working on their presentation.