I believe it should be carefully thought out....we could let the leaders of each house get together.....Erin, Deb, Howard, and Candy could oversee this to make sure the groups were even and compatiible.
Membership is important, but I don't feel omnisicient enough to know how to generate a good working group. The random number approach will assure that each house has equal membership from 9-12. I think that Deb Merwin and Erin should look over to groups to pull out any really obvious wrong matches that might doom that partiuclar house. Intervention of this sort could also be detrimental. The goal here is to have 10 equally matched groupings. It would doom the system to have a reall "cool" house because of the people in it and a really nerdy house. I am hoping that with the power of numbers, randomness, math!!! that we could balance all the Houses.
If our population were 300, I would agree that random selection would be the best option, but there are so many interrelationships among our students that the membership should certainly be engineered, just as this past year's advisory groups were scrutinized for balance. I think that faculty oversight should be key in establishing a good group mix, because, as you have written, these fixed groups will have to "live" with their classmates for a long time and preemptive scrutiny is a must.
ok, so far we agree that we need balance and that we need to keep interrelationships in mind when creating the houses. It seems that we also agree that the final review of houses should be left up to Deb and Erin. Shall we proceed with the power of numbers to come up with a preliminary list?
Barb, this probably makes sense as a starting point. It surely wouldn't hurt...and would take no effort on our parts...to let the computer randomly generate lists; then once the lists are created, we could have Erin/Deb/? (anyone else?) mull over them to see how the mix works and to make adjustments.
I think we should decide on the # of houses, then decide on the house parents of each, then decide on membership of houses. I agree that a computer generated list "tweaked" by some faculty would make sense. In terms of leaders I would try to pick members who are not already leaders in multiple organizations.
I believe it should be carefully thought out....we could let the leaders of each house get together.....Erin, Deb, Howard, and Candy could oversee this to make sure the groups were even and compatiible.
ReplyDeleteMembership is important, but I don't feel omnisicient enough to know how to generate a good working group. The random number approach will assure that each house has equal membership from 9-12. I think that Deb Merwin and Erin should look over to groups to pull out any really obvious wrong matches that might doom that partiuclar house. Intervention of this sort could also be detrimental. The goal here is to have 10 equally matched groupings. It would doom the system to have a reall "cool" house because of the people in it and a really nerdy house. I am hoping that with the power of numbers, randomness, math!!! that we could balance all the Houses.
ReplyDeleteIf our population were 300, I would agree that random selection would be the best option, but there are so many interrelationships among our students that the membership should certainly be engineered, just as this past year's advisory groups were scrutinized for balance. I think that faculty oversight should be key in establishing a good group mix, because, as you have written, these fixed groups will have to "live" with their classmates for a long time and preemptive scrutiny is a must.
ReplyDeleteok, so far we agree that we need balance and that we need to keep interrelationships in mind when creating the houses. It seems that we also agree that the final review of houses should be left up to Deb and Erin. Shall we proceed with the power of numbers to come up with a preliminary list?
ReplyDeleteBarb, this probably makes sense as a starting point. It surely wouldn't hurt...and would take no effort on our parts...to let the computer randomly generate lists; then once the lists are created, we could have Erin/Deb/? (anyone else?) mull over them to see how the mix works and to make adjustments.
ReplyDeleteI think we should decide on the # of houses, then decide on the house parents of each, then decide on membership of houses. I agree that a computer generated list "tweaked" by some faculty would make sense. In terms of leaders I would try to pick members who are not already leaders in multiple organizations.
ReplyDeleteI second Bill here: we should proceed in that order and all of us should have some tweekage input.
ReplyDelete