Assignments

Group Reflection Assignment

Due Session 4

Throughout this practicum we will take time to reflect on your experience as individuals and as a team. This first assignment is designed to support the functioning of your work group. Each of you comes to this practicum with various experiences working in groups. Those experiences affect how you engage in and work with your practicum work group. However, most groups do not spend time on the front end acknowledge the history that each of member of the group brings into the group.

Assignment

This assignment has 5 steps and is to be done within each work group. Please note that while this is usually a facilitated process your group will have to self facilitate.

Steps

1. Each person in the work group writes for 5 minutes on the following questions:
   1. Name the three experiences of working in a group that allowed you to feel most competent.
   2. Name the three experiences that left you feel disappointed by the functioning of the group.
2. One person in the group reports out on their top answer for the first question (these should be charted or written down in a way that they are visible to each person in the group). In reporting out the person should provide a little background on the experience but focus on the impact this experience had on the way they function in a group.
3. After each person has reported on their three answers to the first question, the group should discuss what these experience suggest about the organization and functioning of their Katrina work group. (List these somewhere so the group can see them.)
4. Repeat this process for the answer to the second question.
5. With this refection in mind the group should discuss what impact this should have on the organization of and communication within the group.

Once these 5 steps are completed the group will need to write up a short (1-2 page) summary of the discussion highlighting the steps the groups has decided to implement in light of the history that each of theme is bringing into the work of the group.

Tremé Observation Assignment

Due Day 4 of New Orleans Site Visit

This assignment is adapted from similar assignments developed by Susan Silberberg for 11.945 Spring 2004, The Springfield Studio. It is intended as an exercise to help students closely observe the neighborhood for clues about the neighborhood's image, transportation, commercial activity, architecture/urban design, and physical/environmental conditions. (PDF)