What are your thoughts on Gender Day? We want to make Gender day the best is can be for our students? What did you see as some strengths and what were some challenges with Gender Day?We will use this info to make our next Gender day even better!!!
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
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10 comments:
I was not due to a personal Day
Organization is a constant problem with gender day. Also, I feel as though it is better to get out of the building if possible and engage the students in some different kinds of activities.
On a positive note, I thought that some of the small group conferences were extremely good. I loved Mr. Allen's on decision making (the domino exhibition was really cool and it tied in nicely with the theme). The kids also had some really good responses to it.
wanted to send this as soon as I got home today. I walked the kids out to Columbia Rd. and they were genuinely happy with their day. They were showing off their pens and soaps and necklaces etc. to staff members and other students and were in a happy mood. I think that the day was successful in their eyes and thats really what we wanted it to be!
I think we as a staff have all learned that we have different ways with dealing with situations. Whatever is effective for us can work and is valid, its just different styles. We had some things out of our hands today - like loosing use of the room we planned to for food and not being able to fit everyone in the PD room at one time -- and so I think we did well dealing with much of it on the fly. In the future what may help us feel like it was a great day too is being clear on how we want kids moving around and when.
I am happy with the day because I know our girls were happy... yeah things weren't perfect, but we said we didn't want there to be real discipline consequences and we wanted the girls to have a good time. I think we were successful in meeting those goals and so it was a success! I hope you enjoyed your day in some part!!!
Strengths/Positives
-Students were invested in the discussions during the morning rotation
-I got a chance to interact with a lot of great kids I never knew
-The special needs kids integrated themselves with the larger group and did a great job interacting
-We were very organized and well planned but students just did not get on board with some things
Weaknesses/Negatives:
-The speech with the former mayor was an absolute embarrassment. It was so bad that even the speaker took time at the end to point out how he's never experienced that behavior during all the talks he has given at various schools.
-There was a breakdown during the game rotation but I'm not sure exactly what happened. For some reason, things just went downhill from there.
-Several students noted that their parents said they would have made food if they had enough advance notice. Maybe next time we should get the word out earlier or send something home.
The girls all enjoyed themselves. They all seemed very happy and engaged during the different activities. A challenge that I had was getting the girls out of my class to go to the next activity. I think more planning time would make the next Gender Day much more successful.
Strengths: Students were engaged during conferences.
It was fun to have an opportunity to interact with the kids outside of the classroom. Seeing all the fellas outside in organized lines doing the warm up exercises was good. I think for the most part the students enjoyed that.
Challenges: Students had difficult time during in the auditorium with the guest speaker.
The day ended with the students making a mess and not enough of them taking ownership to clean it up.
Things we could improve upon is getting students more involved with the planning of gender day, so that they might feel more ownership of the strengths and challenges that were presented that day.
Maybe they should also have to answer this question.
1. Gender day sucked!
2. Strengths = teachers worked well together. Challenges = not knowing all the kids names, transitions, having 84 boys together, bus problems, lunch problems, some people not taking an active role leaving others to do more work because they do nothing, I could write forever.
I'll be taking a personal day next gender day!
I love the idea of gender day, and I believe that our students both need and deserve it. I think that we should have had more of a conversation about what we wanted both our males and females to take away from it. I think there are so many issues that face our students today. I believe that our females need activities that can both empower them, but that they can enjoy as well. I am not so sure how I feel about making gender day about "fun" and "fun only". I believe that it should be an element of it, but we should be including activities that is useful and relevant to our students.
I, personally, was a little overwhelmed with it. I know I am too much of a planner, but things for me were a little "loose" and I wasn't very comfortable with it. I believe that we would have benefited as a staff if we had planned a little more...and thought about the objectives of the actual day.
I think there is great potential in the idea of a gender day, but I do not think we have found it yet.
On the positive side, I think the kids really enjoyed it.
On a positive note, I believe the girls enjoyed themselves at Gender Day...and we wanted that to be one of the main goals.
However, there was a great deal of confusion and chaos. I feel as a staff we need to be better organized and take more time to carefully plan each event and the efforts it takes to run each event successfully. If we do that, we will see less behavior issues from the students and more satisfaction and patience from the staff.
I wasn't there for the entire day, however I heard that the conference was very boring, I heard the girls commenting on how boring was the first part of the day and that it was their worst girls day. However the second part, after lunch all the girls loved the activities, for staff on the other hand , we could have planned a better way to transition the girls from one activity to other. Overall everything went fine.
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