Blog 4

The four kinds of approaches to discussion are responding to a problem, responding to an observation, responding to a narrative and reflecting on classroom activities. Given Christine’s mother in laws observation about the public’s lack of knowledge about local farms and farmers markets we have decided to look at responding to an observation. A question to facilitate the discussion in a class could be “How many of you know where a local farm is located, and how did you find out where it was?”

There are many best practices to help facilitate a discussion such as preparing the students for a discussion; create standards for rules of conduct during a discussion; and it is important for the teacher to have a script and a flexible plan for the discussion. The questions to describe best practices are.

1.       Ask students questions such as “what do you like to do when you talk to people?”

2.       Ask the class to come to a consensus about appropriate behavior when in a class discussion.

3.       Ask the students “Has anyone ever experienced this in your life” to further keep the discussion going. 

4.       If a class discussion is not going well to reestablish the discussion you could ask probing questions such as “has anyone ever seen anything like what we are talking about” which makes connections to their lives. Asking questions about a smaller detail versus the entire picture could also help the discussion.

Service Learning Project

                We have started a Facebook page hoping to utilize a more modern approach of communicating with the public about our issue of supporting local agriculture. In this Facebook page we hope to include information such as locations of local farms and farmers markets, laws that impact the local agriculture community, and to be a resource for people of the North Shore to  find information on local agriculture.

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