Group Work - Intervener

Jan 20, 2014 at 11:30 AM by Stephen MacKinnon

The Intervener Assignment is ideal for group work. The questions will spark a lot of good discussion among the students. Much of the student learning will take during these discussions.

How do you imagine this group work to be organized?

This post was edited on: 2014-01-20 at 11:47 AM by: Stephen MacKinnon (Moderator)

4 Replies

Ellen Francis
Jan 22, 2014 at 11:29 AM

One challenge that I would put forward is how is this activity going to demo the ins and outs of GreenLearning? It would be interesting if we could do something across classrooms.
For e.g. We could have two (or more???) "launch dates" per year where we would have classes across Canada collaborate on this. Every class that registers would be given a label (FN, NGO, company, researcher, etc…) and the class would work together to learn about specific issues that have historically been raised by these groups of people. Then they could put together their statement of concern and there would be a period of time where all of the classes could review the different statements of concern and "vote" to determine whether or not each class would get intervenor status.
It seems to me that if we had ten labels, we could just take on as many classes as are interested and they could be automatically plugged into a "oilsands project group". If there were less than five for the final group, we could manually plug them into one of the other groups. That way, GL acts as a connector to allow for dialogue across the country, while also providing the important background content and direction to the activity.
What do you think?

Stephen MacKinnon
Jan 23, 2014 at 9:24 AM

Great ideas Ellen.

There are lots of ways that this Intervener unit could work.

A national multi-school collaboration would work very well. It would be particularly interesting to watch the learning of students from different provinces. The Oil Sands issue has many perspectives. A student in Nova Scotia will start with a certain perspective and during the activity in the role of an intervener that student will learn a lot and may take on a new perspective.

Exciting stuff.

This post was edited on: 2014-01-23 at 09:34 AM by: Stephen MacKinnon

Stephen MacKinnon
Jan 23, 2014 at 9:31 AM

Ellen mentioned the possible of peer review - students reviewing other students work.

This would be an essential part of the Intervener unit. At first students are immersed in the role of their stakeholder and will take one a single perspective on the issues of the development.

By having the students look at other Statements of Concern, they will see the broader perspective. I could see this working in the online environment ... the Statement of Concern could be a blog posting and the peer review would be comments by other students to the blogs.

There is also the final step in which intervener status is granted or not. This could be done by the teacher, by a panel of students or a panel of experts. Students would probably write reflective pieces at the end on the outcomes.

Stephen MacKinnon
Jan 23, 2014 at 9:36 AM

Like many activities in COOL this intervener activity is very flexible and could be effectively delivered in a number of different situations.

Individual work – Home school

Traditional teacher – individual work

Traditional teacher – group work – jigsaw puzzle method

Flipped classroom – online + traditional

Single online class – individual – self-paced

Single online class – simple groups

2 online classes

National Collaboration