West Adams

wow, I am very behind on my postings. Well, my posting will not be as complete and well composed as my other team mates from West Adams. Abel put together a very nice list of things that worked and did not work for us. He had some great points in there too that I do not need to repeat. I would like to add that we introduced the concept of debate. First within the smaller divided groups and then to the class as a whole. How it worked initially was I broke the group in half and based on what the topic was I told one group they HAD to be for and the other was against, regardless of their personal beliefs. So, example... 5 kids had to argue that the depiction of the female body in hip-hop music videos was positive and good for young girls, the other 5 kids had to argue that it was negative. I would tell them to look at one another not me, I had nothing to do with the debate, although I would intervene if I felt someone who was shy was trying to speak but no one was listening, or someone had a good point. They all tend to talk over one another in the end, so let it happen. After the debate would reach a satisfying closing point, I would swap the question to something that maybe had come up from within the debate or something new entirely. So now the 5 who had been on the negative side had to be for the positive and vice a versa. Another debate that we had was is music art? Split the group in half and half of the kids have to argue yes and the others no, regardless of how they truly feel. They came up with some very interesting arguments,