Cooperation is Key for Productivity

After Michele and Christine's inquiry lesson and witnessing a few cooperation challenges in the second grade, our class decided to make a video demonstrating good and bad cooperation. The video consisted of three scenarios; the first demonstrated one person dominating a business meeting, the second scenario demonstrated everyone arguing in a business meeting, and the third scenario demonstrated everyone cooperating, listening to each other, and valuing each other's opinion in the business meeting. I felt the cooperation video was an excellent idea and I definitely saw an improvement in the behavior of the students after they had viewed the video. I would use this video in my own classroom and I would recommend it to all teachers; I feel that visualizing good and bad cooperation instead of vocalizing good and bad cooperation makes for a better understanding to the students. During Michele and Christine's cooperative lesson, the students prepared a pitch for the Venture Capitalist to raise money for their companies. To prepare the students for this task, a video demonstrating a pitch was shown to the students and an in class demonstration was given. I felt the students still were not quite sure about what it was they were supposed to do for the pitch and perhaps if the pitch was modeled and explained a bit more they would have understood the pitch procedure better. I feel that all of us are learning from each other's lessons, how we could improve upon the lessons, and what might be a better way of doing something in the lessons; all of our experiences in the BizWorld project lessons are an asset to our future teaching.