Prompt: overviewWhat a "Prompt" is—and why We will be doing a lot of reading in this course—articles and chapters by published authors, for example. This is "formal" reading. We'll also be reading email reflections from one another as well as my musing. This is functional reading. As Russ Hunt puts it: "One of my aims as a teacher is to widen the range of kinds of written text which we attend to, and to widen the range of ways in which people are comfortable dealing with written texts." As part of that broadening, I am as Hunt says, "introducing two unusual kinds of texts, and inviting you to participate in dealing with them. The first one is "the prompt"—documents, like this one, in which I explain what I think we ought to do (and often talk about why we're doing it, too)." Why will I use prompts? There are lots of reasons but the major one is that it's a useful vehicle for inviting you to undertake a task, or to offer some direction, in a way that lets you to interact with it; perhaps more important, it forces me to articulate coherently (I hope) what I'd like you to think about or to undertake. As we go along, my "prompts" might actually show up in my reflective musings—in which case, I'll reiterate them as a "prompt." The second kind of texts are those you'll produce—spontaneous writing we'll do when we're together, email to the Yahoo group, reponses to my musings, as well as more "formal" writing as your investigations unfold. Between now and our first meeting Please read my Opening Letter. Dialogue with it—write your questions in the margins, underline what you're not sure you understand... if you're uncomfortable or confused, make note of that When you're done, take a 5 X 7 index card and freewrite: just let your thoughts about what I have to say about our course come to you. We'll use these cards when we meet to focus our discussion on how the course might play out and what you hope to get out of it. The point of doing some reading and writing before we actually get together is so we have something acutally to workshop when we meet in Summerside. Reading Learning To Teach By Uncovering Our Assumptions should give you an idea about what you're trying to capture from the chaos of what goes on during a day. Use that article to help you get started noticing critical incidents. Bring whatever critical incidents you manage to create to our gathering. I hope to spend the bulk of our time exploring your critical incidents. |
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