Tuesday: The teaching partners made good use of the timer for each activity. But sometimes the instructions were not clearly given where it seemed like they were finished. The instructions were given without modeling and then quickly the timer started. At one point I was still waiting for more detailed or refined instructions but then noticed that the timer had already started. But for each activity I facilitated it with the materials I had as I saw fit. 

For the first activity on Tuesday, the line graphs that were least complicated I gave to the students to use. There was one that was very complicated and I opted to not give that one. It was a bit confusing to have 3 types of materials and only use 2 at first. It wasn't very deliberate nor clear how each phase of the activity would proceed. But after the initial confusion, our group proceeded to have one person describe the graph to one person to draw. After every person did that one time, I had the group simultaneously tell one person in pairs. They switched roles as speaker and listener than when we did it the first time. For leftover complicated graphs, I had the students use the sentence cards to match them to the graph, but it didn't seem to all match so we made up sentences for them with our homework as a guide. 

Thursday: 
There was a lot of scaffolding involved in this class. I think for two reasons. One was the content need scaffolding and two, the directions weren't super clear. The directions felt rushed to meet the time of the class and even the task on the ppt said to start the proposal. I think the directions were too brief and made it difficult to sink it.

The students weren't very clear on how to make a proposal. I think the intent of the activities were good but still too difficult for the little sisters. The first activity where they had to create research questions could have been aided more if they had options to the research questions for the first two. That way they could see what research questions were too general or too specific for the chart/graph. One half of my group only worked on one graph the whole time to create a research question while using the homework to aid them. The other half of the group looked at two or three graphs but had difficult forming a full research question even with my help. I'm not sure if the task was a little too difficult that they lost interest after trying repeatedly. So we didn't even get a chance to create questions for most of the graphs.

There was some confusion for the last activity presentation. What was the difference between the proposal and research question? I guided my group to create a proposal for the magazine article and then use the research question to help them get support for that proposal. But most groups just presented their research question and survey questions. There wasn't a clear distinction between the the proposal and the research question so people didn't really address the proposal. By the time we had finished the graphs and before presenting we had already forgotten what the context for the task was because it was so far removed in time. Perhaps if we had re-read the PPT with the task context then it would have clicked better.

Time wise the teaching partners worked diligently with the timer and reminders and made sure to continue to the activity quickly.

I had to work hard with one or two group members to keep them motivated and interested in the tasks. It's difficult when the teaching partners say things that might make them disengaged as well. I think just clear goals and steps for each activity will help them retain interest and stay engaged with knowing their expectations. They overall seemed to be okay with the week. But it took constant mental battling their disengagement.