Before the Practice Performance Task Process even started, I was very stressed about having to work with so many people to put together a good presentation in such a short amount of time. It didn’t get any better once we actually started either. However, we did work together and figured it out. We chose a question, chose lenses, found perspectives, did research, and eventually presented.
We started by creating a question which we answered with certain lenses seen through different perspectives. The first thing we did was create questions individually that we though could be answered thoroughly. We all got together as a group and went over each of our questions and how they could be answered. To decide on which question we chose, we picked the one that would be easiest to find information for considering our limited time for research.
Then, we had to decide who was doing which lenses. We discussed which lenses would answer the questions best and we decided those to be the Historical/Political, Socio-cultural, Ethical, Economical, and the Futuristic lens. Our process for deciding who got each of these lenses was easy; we just picked one by one out of those five lenses. Individually within our lens, we created our perspectives. We had a lot of the similar perspectives due to our topic, but some were different. From this point, we could begin out research.
Researching and finding credible sources was not very hard, but it was very tedious and annoying. Individually we had to find at least seven sources to use for our IRR. It was easy to find sources in the topic of the gender wage gap since it is a big, nationwide issue. I then had to CRAAP on them to see if they were credible sources, which most of them were credible and had fairly little bias. Converting all of the information I collected was hard because I had found so much good information, I didn’t know what to cut out.
Our group found a lot of information that answered our question as multiple different lenses. We were able to share those articles, documents, or videos with each other helping each of us with our IRR’s. This meant that some of us had the same information in our research, but it still answered the same question, just a little bit differently from another viewpoint. Then, we all had to cut our research down even more for our TMP. We had to pick the very best out of each of our arguments to answer our question in about one minute to keep in in our time limit. Then it was time to put together the presentation.
Putting together the presentation was probably the easiest part of the whole process. We had already done all of the heavy lifting in our IRR’s; all we had to do was present it to the class. We started our presentation by creating a google slides PowerPoint. Each of us worked to decide who would go first and who would go last, based on the information we were presenting and how it flowed together.
Then, we added our slide with our lens and an image that incorporated the gender pay gap, and our works cited at the end. It did not look fancy by any means, but it was effective in showing our question and who had what lens. It was hard to practice our presentation as a whole group because we were never all available at the same time because we are all such busy people. We each practiced our pieces individually, timing ourselves to make sure that we were under one minute and we had to trust each other that we were.
When it came time to present, we all read our pieces and were fairly on track with time although almost everyone went over their time by just a little. It left me with not much time to do my lens and the conclusion. That led me to going over my lens faster than I would have liked, causing me to stutter more than I should have. Watching ourselves in the video, we did better than I thought we did. We were almost all loud enough to hear and we did not stutter, minus a couple times when I was trying to speed my part up. We also managed to give out fairly good eye contact without too much reading of our notecards. We did better than I was anticipating us doing which was a big weight of my shoulders.
Looking over the practice Performance Task, it was very stressful time during this process, but I think all of the stress came from overthinking. We each worked well to find our question, lenses, and perspectives, we also found too much information that had to be cut down into our IRR’s, and we cut down our information even more to develop a good TMP. For the actual Performance Task, I think it will be easier because we now understand the process, and it will not be overthought as much. Plus, we have a little more time for the TMP and a smaller group.
