Fun with librarians

Today in EDUC 504 we were look enough to take a part of a "soft opening" of the brand new Brandon Center in the School of Education. The Brandon Center is a new collaboration center with beautiful meetings areas and tools for active collaboration. I can see how the way the individual spaces are arranged encourage active and open discussion of ideas.

For our activity today, we were broken up into groups 4 and 5 according to teaching major and with one librarian. Our librarian Addie was an absolute asset today. She brought some interesting ideas and perspectives to our activity. It was great she could take our overarching goals of creating a lesson plan to have students become educated consumers of energy, learn about nuclear energy, and alternative energy options; and create a coherent and well planned out lesson plan. Her idea of having students create person facebook profiles of an individual nuclear plant was absolutely genius. It will allow students to learn the basics of nuclear power, the different forms of nuclear power plants in America, the politics of nuclear power, and the reasons why some power plants are built near bodies of water and some aren't. The facebook page will also teach students to use social networking in a fun and educational manner. I am going to have to remember this lesson for my own teaching in the future.

After the lesson plan activity, the groups got together to discuss other matters such as classroom management that can effect the power of lessons. One idea we discussed was how to arrange classroom to make group work more manageable and less disruptive and noisy. I thought the idea of putting tennis balls on the legs of tables was very interesting. They would make moving tables more quiet and less disruptive to classroom activities.

I also thought the discussion on how to arrange students in groups was interesting. When I GSI'ed chemistry at Michigan, I made it a point to create lab groups with a range of abilities and personalities. I found groups work much better if all team members are able to make valuable contributions and bring their own strengths to the group. In my six terms of teaching at Michigan, I have only had to break up one group and it was due to a serious health risk two members were posing because of their screwing around.