Summary
The final project will take place over the final two class sessions. Students, split up by their recitation groups, will answer questions written by other recitation groups. The group that wrote the question will then critique and evaluate the answer given. Questions will cover material from the entire class, so the entire process will serve as a comprehensive review and wrap-up of the course material.
Detailed Schedule
On the first day, students will split into their recitation groups. Students in each recitation session must come up with a total of three questions and answers to those questions. Two of the questions should be on the first 5 / 6ths of the semester; ideally they should not repeat material covered in the four assigned papers. The third question should cover education.
After the first class, the professors will review the questions and ensure the questions crafted by the different recitations are high quality. The goal is to ensure the questions are good ones—that is, challenging enough to make students think but do not require such detailed answers that the answer can be delivered clearly in a few minutes. The instructors will also make sure that the questions crafted by different sections are different. They will finalize the questions, possibly changing the wording or requesting some adjustments be made during recitation, and select one of the two non-education questions for each recitation.
During the final recitation session between the two class sessions, the students will be made aware of any changes made to their questions and will adjust their answers if necessary. The TAs should ask students to suggest major concepts or issues covered in the course that might crop up in the questions they will be asked to answer, which should set the agenda for a student-led review of the semester. TAs will assign 4 students key roles for the in class activity: two responders (to answer the questions) and two critiquers (to critique the answers of other groups).
During the final session, the class will split into the recitation groups. All groups will receive their first question and have ten minutes to prepare an answer. The designated responder from Group A will then have 3 minutes in which to deliver that group’s answer to question 1 (Q1). The first critique in the group that wrote the question (Group D) will have about 2 minutes to critique the answer. There will then be a couple of minutes in which members of other groups can chime in. Next, Group B will respond to Q1, and so forth. Each group should quickly fill out an evaluation for the group that answers their question. The process will then be repeated for the second question.
The questions will be distributed as follows:
|
SECTION A
|
SECTION B
|
SECTION C
|
SECTION D
|
|
AQ1→B
|
BQ1→C
|
CQ1→D
|
DQ1→A
|
|
AQ2→C
|
BQ2→D
|
CQ2→A
|
DQ2→B
|
In the past, students have not been “graded” on the spot. The focus should be kept on substance, not evaluation.
