Casey CO #2

Monday, 1:00- 1:50PM

3A Speaking

Olivia James

During this class, Professor James recounted the trip to the museum that the class had last week to the Claude Pepper Museum. Professor explained to me that last week during their introductions she focused heavily on the core values of the students in the class by having students pair up and talk about themselves to each other, have the partners present each other to the group and then have the group match core values to members. 

Professor asked the students to pair up into groups of 3-4 students to work on a discussion of the questions she prepared. Each student in the group would have a role as either writer, tally taker, facilitator, or speaker. The group had four questions to answer regarding the life of Claude Pepper 1) Who is Claude Pepper? 2)What was his life like? 3) When did people fight him for his beliefs? 4) In your opinion, what are the five core values of Claude Pepper that best exemplify him? Why do you believe this? 

With these questions, the students needed to discuss each question led by the facilitator, keep track of how many times each group member spoke to answer the questions recorded by the tally taker, write down their answer on a sheet of paper done by the writer, and answer each question aloud with the whole group done by the speaker. The class used a preselected list of personal core values that could be used in order to describe Mr. Pepper. Since the group took a trip to the museum, they were very familiar with his life story. Professor gave the groups 15 minutes to discuss their answers before they would come back together to answer. 

Professor walked around the class and listened to the discussion each group was having about why they were choosing specific values and creating their reasons based on events that happened in Mr. Pepper's life as support. This assignment brought up lessons of culture and American history when talking about Mr. Pepper's experiences with communism during the time of World War 2 and how the American public felt about his views. 

Professor ended class by highlighting the group discussion that the students will be having during the next class, mentioning that it will also focus on core values and personal beliefs. She also gave the students some feedback about their written answers on grammar and past tense, since Mr. Pepper is deceased.
This lesson showed me the importance of having group mates work together on assignments to facilitate discussion and problem solving together. I saw many students correcting each others mistakes and focusing on creating their final discussion answers in proper English.