March Session

Today was a very productive day. We started out with a presentation by Courtney Bryant, teacher at South Atlanta. She showed us what her action research was about and it made a great connection for most of us just what this action research can look like. I found her presentation very helpful and insightful. Pink's six senses were definitely evident in her presentation and the work with her children. Story, symphony, design, empathy, play and synthesize were very evident in her presentation.

Critical Aesthetic Response Class: Dr. Rensburg's class really got us going on the action research. She went over with us and gave examples of how we can begin setting up our action research. We discussed the following components that we should include:

1. Describe the problem 2. What is the aim? 3. Domain, time frame, who, how long, what grade, when - answer these questions 4. Method - don't use too many - How can we fix the problem? 5. Document the results - narrative / quantitative - graphs, charts, pies, tables, figures, number of students, etc 6. Analysis - Put the results in narrative form. Which method work, what didn't work? 7. Conclusion - What recommendations can I make? From now on....... Remind the students daily to........ etc.

Dr. Rensburg informed us to visit her blog regularly if we have questions as well as to take advantage of the many resources that she has posted on her blog. This will be very helpful to us in working on our action research and keeping abreast of our expectations.

Teacher as Artist Class: Mrs. Colbert's class was great and definitely informative. She shared with us the book "Music From the Inside Out". We viewed several clips from the DVD as well. This session was very helpful in getting us started on our composition project.

As as collaborative class,we began brainstorming ideas for our composition. We answered two key questions today: 1. What is our inspiration for writing the piece? Many aspects of life are out of our control but man's will to persevere restores order to our lives. 2. What is our intention with this piece? 2. It is our intention to take our audience through and array of feelings and emotion, very much how a person going through life with changes and unexpected situations might feel. Some adjectives we used were empathy, anxiety, chaos, peace, hope, resolution, hope, tension and release. Powerful class today. We are going to individually begin mapping out the piece. A worksheet was issued to go along with the group to direct us on the right path. Great class today!

Webinar Tutorial: We concluded the day in the computer lab setting ourselves up for the upcoming webinar sessions. This was great. We are ready to roll.

Great day today. I really enjoyed all the sessions. Glad to be back on track and in the know.