U2 Day 1-2: PD Discussion Topic

My school is under heavy construction, so my students are facing traffic and parking issues. These often lead to tardiness, even to the point where we had school busses late everyday for the first few months. Students were eager to discuss something that (1) affected them negatively and immediately, and (2) they felt they could actually have some impact on a solution.

What my class really focused on was the privacy issues and what kind of data we give off. Very eye opening for them

I will be discussing student athletes because so many students think that they can survive in this world by playing sports alone.Students will be asked to research athletes that have graduated from this school who made it to the pros and those who did not, what alternatives they had.

I will have my students discuss the dress code. They are middle school students and there has been a big push for them to follow the school divisionā€™s dress code policy.I think this will be authentic to them.

My students chose to talk about the dress code, they thought it was a problemā€¦ After the discussion, they couldnā€™t come up with anything different and ended up liking our dress codeā€¦

When I did this lesson with my class, most of my students wanted to use community issues that were local and specific. Students thought about issues with school transportation, public activities for low income neighborhoods, and job readiness. The issues were close to the students and they bought into the discussion.

We have a local board trying to put in a YMCA with tax money that has been collected over the last 15 years and a group has been developed to stop this from happening. We used that as our community problem.

Some topics that would be of interest to my own students would be the closed campus policy, or the school dress code. Either of these would provide some great discussions.

My students discussed the problem of water conservationā€“a very pressing issue for students in southern California.

I would have my students discuss the problem of not having enough local activities to do. We are in a very rural area. The students seem to have a lot of idle time. When school is not taking up time the students have little to do.

A problem visible in my community is graffiti.

Because of the size of our community and the limited space for trash disposal, I had students focus on how to increase recycling in the city.

I asked my students to think of problems that were plaguing the community. We came up with a list and half the class looked at one, the other half at another. We ended up talking about transportation issues in NYC and trash on the streets in Harlem.

We have problems with bus routes for our school. My students are VERY aware of this problem as it affects most of them. This is a great problem for them to ā€˜solveā€™.

We discussed the issue of sustainability within our community.

As I mentioned in an earlier post - a community problem we have in our school is the ongoing construction that is requiring the students to re-route themselves to get between classes. I think this could be done in a similar manner to the routing activity already included in the curriculum.

discussed number of grocery stores and banks in the neighborhood around the school, compared to other neighborhoods that are more affluent. the neighborhood around the school has fewer grocery stores and banks than more affluent neighborhoods

I asked my students what was a community problem their response, was lack of entertainment options, i.e. there are no bowling alleys, movie theaters, skating rinks, etc. The students also mentioned a lack of employment options.

I asked my students to pick a community problem in their local area. Many of them brought out very good topics like; undocumented students, deportation separate families, graffiti, lack of water in CA, bullying, gang wars, improper garbage disposals, teen pregnancy, homeless people in LA, cyberbullying, sexual harassmentā€¦and more.

One of the biggest problems in our community is poverty. This is a very broad topic, which I like because students can come up with very different, yet specific ways to attack the problem.