Speculation
One
of the units of Objective Advanced, the book we have been using at
ARCI, is about speeches. It begins with a reading exercise of an
extract of Martin Luther King’s famous
speech “I Have a Dream.”
As
a follow-up, the book suggests an activity that consists of a debate
on a current issue in teams and a presentation of the teams’
conclusions.
Issues
Designing Project Activities
I felt the debate needed some scaffolding and students needed information as well as specific vocabulary about their chosen issues.
That is why, after organizing themselves in teams of 4/5 students and deciding what issue they would address (it could be one of the issues suggested by the book or one of their own), I gave them a week’s time to browse the web to complete this worksheet:
After
the discussion, the book suggests that teams report back to the rest
of the class through a presentation by an appointed spokesperson.
Conducting Project Activities
However,
I felt that
the information discussed could be further processed and made into a
multimedia presentation in which all the members of the team had a
chance to contribute.
That’s
why I invited each team to prepare a presentation about their issue
along the following guidelines:
- length: 8 – 10 minutes
- use of multimedia resources: beamer, powerpoint, youtube (or any other) videos, music, photographs, etc.
- participation of all the members of the team
We
set dates for the different presentations and I encouraged them to do
their best as they would be evaluated by their peers.
Project Outcomes
Watch part of the presentations in the following video.
Evaluation
During
the presentations, the rest of the class had to complete the
following summary and assessment grid:
The
purpose of the summary and the evaluation was to make sure the class
would profit from the presentations and not just listen passively. As
well as this, the score system turned
the whole activity into a competition, which hopefully would motivate
students even further.
After
the discussion, we held a humble awards ceremony during which I
revealed the results of their assessment.
Summary
The
whole project took about a month:
Teacher: Mariana De Biassi
No comments:
Post a Comment
Leave your comment here!