Entry 8

The course that I will be designing for this class is an advanced public relations course. It will be a senior-level course taken only by students that have a public relations major. This course will be two semesters long and require a heavy amount of work to be done outside of class. The purpose of this course will be to design a campaign for a local business that is in need of some extra help.

The first activity that I found useful from the reading was having the students write a journal. The book suggested that this activity be done outside of class, but I think it would be more useful to have it done in class. Journaling in class will provide more benefits by allowing the students time to write and then discussing it directly after with the class, a group, or a partner. The journal will reflect on how the students feel about their current project or case study they are working on. It will allow them to express their struggles as well as their strengths and hopefully find that others are having common attitudes. This assignment would not be graded, but as it states in McKeachie, “This is graded. You get 100 if you do it; 0 if you don’t.” I believe that students will be more comfortable expressing such feelings and attitudes knowing that their writing isn’t graded which will, I hope, encourage more truth and voice within each entry.

My second activity, active learning, would be correlation with the journal articles the students will be writing. Each class meeting, the student will be expected to write briefly in their journal about the projects they have currently been working on (what is working for them and what isn’t working for them). They could also write about a recent case study they found interesting or an ideas and examples they have or want to use for generated their own public relations campaign. When the students are done, they will meet for a short period of time to discuss everything they had written. They will share with others ways to overcome their problem areas and work together to make each individual feel more comfortable and stronger in their weaker points. Individually the students will be expected to keep their journal entries in an organized portfolio throughout both of the semesters so they can reflect on their work and how they have progressed. This will also enable the student to demonstrate signs of improvement each week, or writing, and learn from their past entries what worked or didn’t work for them.

This course will be focused on creating a public relations campaign for a company chosen by the instructor and evaluated for a semester by the students. With this, the course will offer a variety of case studies to be evaluated by the students to learn how to put together a campaign along with the positive and negative effects of good/bad campaigns. Each one these case studies will require steps of problem-solving and applying these steps to their individual projects. Those case studies that have shown poor public relations work will be examined in detail then re-worked, in groups, to make it into a successful campaign.

The activities after the lecture seem to be the most common way to go about it, but there was one time we had the activity before the lecture and it really made a difference. Getting students involved right at the beginning of class seems to help motivate them to learn more about the topic after the activity is performed. Students seem to engage themselves better in hopes to justify the knowledge with the activity. Performing the activity at the beginning can also make students more curious about the subject and therefore leading them to gain a better understanding by the end of the lecture. I thought this worked really well for the lecture we listened to, however, I do not know that this would work best in all situations.
Another thing that works well for me when participating in a group project is having the instructions either on the board or on a PowerPoint slide. This makes it easier for the group to grasp a common understanding and we can report back to that slide if the teacher is not available to answer questions. Having the directions presented in front of us also provides for a strong structure on answers.



The link I found helpful this week covers writing journals.