Promising Practices Reflection

Week 10

Before the speakers reached the content of the topic, each speaker was introduced. Their name, where they came from, where they went to school and how they are affiliated with Promising Practices. I felt that is was almost too much because the more i heard the more challenging it became to remember each speaker. I believe that each person could have been announced with their name, their degree and how they work with promising practices.One introduction of a speaker was not correct. After the speech an official came back to fix this person’s introduction despite the effort I did not think anyone was paying much attention because after a certain time span your attention span gives out. It stated that an adult’s attention span is about 20 minutes.  The speeches should have been more geared around that aspect because any speaker would hope the audience would listen to their speech. If the speakers stopped for questions in between instead of at the end

the audience would be more interested since they would hear a conversation instead of one voice. In my personal opinion i love when speakers allow questions during their speech because it becomes more interactive so i become more focused. 

I was not aware that we would listen to a panel of officials for an hour and half. I found it to be very difficult to digest because there were six different voices. It became difficult when on speaker would began to speak for only another speaker to take the floor. Which made it hard to follow along to the content. After the talk was completed, they allowed the floor to be open for questions. My head was so stuck on comprehending that I lost my train of thought to form a question. When questions were asked I feel that some of them were not answered as well as I expected, one speaker seemed to ramble on about his opinion instead of answering the question.

 

When i was in my first session it much easier to pay attention to the one speaker versus the previous six i listened to. I liked that it was promoting art in school because i am very artistic. The activity we were assigned was to paint either a flower or a bird. I found it to be very relaxing as i soon lost all attention for everything but the paint. I do however not like other elements of this speech, for example we did a drawing exercise. We began by folding the paper in half, then we drew a witch's silhouette on one side. As she was explaining this activity she said that people with disabilities cannot complete this activity successfully and continued on to say that we as teachers should not assign this to students under the special education umbrella. I was very offended by this statement because she said it like she knew what she was talking about.

This professional did not even quote where she discovered this statement. In my perspective i can say that what she said is not valid because i am dyslexic but i am very artistic. I have been dancing for 12 years and painting and mixing color schemes come naturally to me. From my dancing experience i have learned the concept of direction and sequences of dances as well as the musicality of dancing. This has helped me academically because sequences in a dance translates to a sequences of events in a essay and learning steps like the shuffle ball change helped me understand how to flow directions in all aspects of learning. I would have been a little less offended if she had quoted her source because you always need to have the "why" to back your belief.

The session on Anti Bullying was also a great example of showing "why" because the two speakers expressed their passion throughout the whole speech. They seemed so hopeful and proud of their goal as they kept the emphasis on making time to show how important anti bullying is so prevalent during this session. I believe that is true because they said they have made such progress with their students as they began by making small groups of people so it was inmate that allowed the students to see others for who they are. I began to also see how difficult this is to teach because many kids will not want to follow it because they might think its stupid so it might time for you to make this idea seem cool. This would be a great way to weave in a LGBT lesson because it could show how bullying hurts others. I began to think how complex this is because these speakers work with middle school age children so the content might be harder to teach. Children progress at different times so certain concepts might be comprehended as soon. one factor i did not enjoy was that one of the speakers took over the floor a lot, at one point i feel that she took the words the other speaker was about to say. As a result it became a little dull to listen to one voice for the majority of the time.

Overall this conference was beneficial in some ways, such as new ideas for teaching and treatment towards our peers and teachers as well as dealing with the emotions of diverse occurrences. Along with the exception of confusion of other speeches, but over time some of it might click in my thought process. It could even become a new tool for my "toolbox."