Presentable

The presentation was very difficult to get together with all the varying schedules, and we were definitely confused as to the outcomes, to some degree. We have some connections we wanted to make with students, to get them into the topic with contextualization and role playing. I think the open-endedness of it, and our inexperience with lesson planning, had us kind of reinventing the wheel, especially at the beginning. We had all studied this novel in high school, and had even all seen it taught in our recent classroom visits. Therefore, we did find this relevant.
My role was to make the PowerPoint presentation, to put together the lesson plan to remind or teach students about the Cold War, and to find and use some alternatives texts (the song and blog poem), and work on ways to present these to students, relating the whole to a Regents Exam essay as our ultimate goal. This process was completely collaborative, though, as we all took part in laying out our strategy and individual lessons.
We worked hard at first to come to a common goal and working relationship. We all had strong ideas about our choice of texts, actually coming up with several skeleton outlines of our unit based on different text sets before settling on The Lord of the Flies. Our common experience with this text in high school, and our mutual interest in the value of this novel, helped to get our ideas flowing. Once we found our stride, we all were able to make suggestions and implement our ideas in individual lessons and exercises.
We all focused on a particular lesson or two, which we then spoke about in our presentation. Each of us also contributed to all the other components of our unit, as well. For my part, I focused quite a bit on vocabulary and activating background knowledge. Sara looked most at the Regents. Donna had great ideas that developed from our conversations. For instance, when I was talking about the climate of the Cold War, she grabbed onto the idea of doing a bomb drill. She also contributed greatly to the day-to-day organization of our unit.
Overall, I learned a ton about lesson planning and collaboration. If I could change anything, it would only be to have had the same text material for the duration of our project. That would have made our efforts much more efficient.