Journal Reflection: Chapters 5 & 6
My students are always anxious to get their hands on the cameras and start filming. They come into the class and they begin asking questions like, “Are we filming today?” or “Do we get the cameras today?” Now I honestly can’t blame them. The first day of class I give them my speech how this is going to be the only day that I talk to them all period long, and how I want to get them up and moving and working as much as possible. So I guess you could say I set myself up for their questions. Not that it bothers me. In fact, I really like their enthusiasm. However, there is some planning that needs to be done before they can head out of the classroom.
Moursund discusses this in both chapters 5 and 6. He opens chapter 5 by saying that is essential to carefully think and lay out a plan at the start of any project. In all my television classes, whether it is the intro course, advanced course, or the news course, we call this brainstorming. Since my unit plan deals with the Advanced Television Production course, I will specifically address that class here. In this class we are working on creating a thirty-minute news magazine show. When a new project is assigned, the first thing we do as a class is brainstorm ideas for topics of the individual segments that will be part of the show. The students will shout out ideas and I will list them on the white board. Once we get a decent amount of potential topics, we start to discuss each one in more depth and begin to narrow our choices. We are looking for five topics for the show, and once we have those five the students select what segment they would like to work on. As crazy as this may sound, most of the time it works out very well that all the segments have between four to five students who want to work on them. There are times when one segment has too many people on it, while another doesn’t have enough, and then I have to help the students come to solution and split things up evenly.
Now comes phase two of our brainstorming. Each group gets together and starts to list ideas for their segments. This includes people to interview, b-roll to get, and specific job responsibilities among the group members. Though it may delay the students from getting their hands on the cameras for a couple of days, this planning is an important first step in their projects. The better plan they have, they easier time they will have executing it and seeing their project to completion.
There were a few other points that Moursund talked about in chapters 5 and 6 that I related to. On page 47 in chapter five, when he first begins to discuss project planning, he poses the question, “What do your students know about doing projects, and what do they need to learn about doing a project?” Well this is essentially the goal of Advanced TV Production. The skills that these students learn in this class are essential to moving on and being successful in the CHS News classes.
Another point made in chapter five deals with resources, or sometimes the lack thereof. One of the biggest problems I face almost on a daily basis is not having enough cameras to go around. When this happens choices have to be made on which group gets the camera and which group doesn’t. Often I’ll make this decision based on which group is further along in their segment, or if a particular group has an interview set up for that day. I guess that’s why I get paid the…ahem…big bucks.
One final thing that really struck me was in chapter six when Moursund talked about, “a challenge to teachers.” He says that teachers often teach the way they were taught, and they gravitate towards a, “stand and deliver” method. When I first started teaching I went in with the belief that I had to be this authoritative figure, and simply teach, teach, teach. Yeah that didn’t work so well. Basically it’s not me, and the kids saw that right away. Now I don’t consider myself a veteran teacher by any means, but when I do talk to new teachers the one piece of advice I give them is to be themselves. Students will respect you more if they don’t think you’re trying to be something you’re not, and consequently they will do better, or at least try to do better in your class because they respect you. I think this is especially true when teaching at the high school level. Of course I’ve only taught high school so that’s really all I know, but I think it’s because of the age of the students. Even though I’m 38-years-old and twenty-plus years older that my students, I still feel like I can relate to them. They know I will be honest with them, and that’s really what I want in return. Things just seem to go much smoother that way.
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