Hot Desert Group Work Projects
This is the penultimate week of S1 and S2 classes before Activities Week and the new timetable kicking in. My Higher class also go on study leave on Wednesday, which means I will hopefully get a bit more time to carry on with some development work.
For the last part of the S2 course we are doing projects on Hot Deserts. These are group work projects that we have developed to test mainly geographical enquiry skills, communication, enterprise and teamwork. I started to develop this activity while I was at Knox Academy and Suzanne Hamilton has been working hard to refine the briefing notes in recent weeks. We have also tried to include some good examples of AifL.
The process is as follows:
- The class is divided into six random groups.
- Each group is given a folder full of resources (including some coloured paper, some lined paper and one sheet of A2 paper)
- All groups have access to the stationary table (which contain coloured pencils, pens, rulers, glue etc..)
- Each group is given a pack of information (including books, print outs from web pages and photographs). Each pack of information is on a different theme. The themes include hot desert plants, hot desert animals, people who live in hot deserts, hot desert location, hot desert resources and desertification.
- The task is to produce a professional poster on the theme that they have been given. We then spend some time discussing what a good professional poster looks like and looking at some good and bad examples of past assessment work.
- The class have two lessons to produce their poster. At the end of lesson two the poster must be on the wall or they will fail the task and loose all marks (meeting this tight deadline is a key part of the assessment).
- The next part is important. It is explained to the class that they have approximately two hours of class time to complete the work. With five people per group this equals ten hours of ‘people time’. At the end of the assignment it is important that all group members can look at the task and say, ‘yes that is ten hours worth of work,’ or, ‘its not ten hours worth of work because…’
Assessment for the task is as follows:
Note that there is more marks available for presentation than content. The failure of many professional posters in higher education is that they are unable to draw in an audience. Although the teacher determines the overall poser grade the group work skills are peer assessed. Everybody is graded on effort, contribution and communication (these terms are carefully defined before the peer assessment takes place).
The group then complete a project outline sheet and get started.
Week one went exceptionally well – I’ll let you know how week two goes and supply a few digital photos of my favourite pieces of work.
Resources
Ollie bray
Wednesday 10 May 2006