Mandy and I got together this morning to go over the study material and then again about a half hour before the session started. Although we both looked over the review powerpoint before, we didn’t realize there weren’t any answers included in it until this morning. That caused some stress on my part because even though we thought we knew the right answers, we wanted to be confident in delivering them…and what if our answers were wrong?! We happened to see Caitlin and Josh, who were trying to find the answers at about the same time we were.
When it came time for the review session, Mandy and I felt prepared and confident, but still had a few discrepancies between our answers, Caitlin and Josh’s answers and the two different books’ answers. Everything had a different version of the truth which was quite confusing at times. When students started coming in, we had them sign the attendance sheet and told them to begin to look over their notes and jot down questions that they had. We asked if anyone had any questions while we waited for a few more to arrive. No one had any questions (we even waited). We decided to continue through the power points, with Mandy doing pages 1-3, me doing 4-7. It worked out nicely because we were both well rehearsed in our “areas” of the powerpoint. Students (41 in all) had generally known the answers before we put the choices up. It was great. We did have a few questions though…we didn’t for sure the size order of chromosomes, genes and DNA. The previous group had a different answer, but we still told them the answer we thought it was…and good thing we did, because it was right! We also had a question on the 7 themes of psychology that the study guide talked about (but we later learned in a mtg w/Gurung that it only applied to Weiten users). It was funny because going into the mtg, Mandy and I weren’t so confident about how it went, but when we left, I think we felt pretty good with how things went. I like how both Mandy and I respond when we are under pressure…we are both super chill and just try to be as honest as possible w/the students. Neither of us freak out about unnecessary things or things we can’t change. I think we work well together.
Looking back on the Gurung & Bord (2007) article, we incorporated pretty much every main idea in the passage…we made sure that we worked cooperatively as a group, we gave the students the chance to test their knowledge first by just presenting the question (metacognition), we held the session the day before and gave students 3 different opportunities to come to one and we didn’t present anything new.
I think it worked, but the true test comes tomorrow. DUN DUN DUUUUNNN.