Thursday, October 2 2008

Today’s Agenda

1) Professional Conversation assignment:

• a. You will talk with, or even interview, a working professional or practitioner from a field you would like to explore. You should start thinking about that interview immediately, even arranging it if you can. Details will be forthcoming next week.

2) Comparison of “changing my mind” papers:

• a. Groups of three or four: timer, scribe, taskmaster
• b. Pass your papers out to the people in your group. As the papers are read, each person develops a written list of similarities and differences in their journal, identifying each remark by the name of the person who made it.
• c. As a group, identify what the papers have in common, and how they differ, and write those down as a summary of what the group thinks about how we change our minds. We will write these on the board.

Time: twenty-five minutes

3) Large group activity:  

• a. Our task: We will assemble a group sense of what “changing my mind” in the full sense really requires and means
• b. Each scribe will reports to the large group – clearly, as a demonstration of professional, oral communication.
• c. Each student listens to other groups’ reports, and adds similarities and differences to his or her own individual list, again “attributing” remarks to the people who make them

Time: twenty-five minutes

 

 Homework for Tuesday:

2 Pages

Compile what you heard in your class into a coherent statement on the group sense of how and why we change our minds, and apply that statement to “higher learning” as you understand it.  You’ll probably need two pages to do this well. 

You might think of this writing as explaining to someone who might come to college in a year or two what to expect and how to prepare. Or it could be written to someone who has not gone to college, to show how he or she could do it.

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