With the absence of our instructor for the first class session, we still decided to be productive! We had the pleasure of meeting with Dr. Connors, and basically, he is the head of Agricultural & Extension Education at University of Idaho.
Now, Dr. Connors was not physically in our class; however, he did chime in via Skype. He shared with a a bunch of interesting facts particularly on the different types of Parliamentary Procedure competitions. Connors was willing enough to answer all of our question on the rule changes and share his input on the competitions. Being that one of our main goals for the class is to be able to coach a team for the Parliamentary Procedure CDE, the information he share with us was very beneficial!
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| An example of how a card is set up. |
For those of you who do not know how a competition goes, Parliamentary Procedure is built up of a team. There are five members and a chairman/chairwoman. Each participant is given a card with a main motion and five motions. Each member is randomly assigned a motion (indicated on the card) and the chair runs the 'meeting'. Each member must debate 4 times and make a separate motion that is not on the card. All of this in 10 minutes 30 seconds or less.
These competitions can get pretty intense, and surely we still need a lot of practice. One strategy that seems to be helping ourselves out is the rotation of the position of the chair. As the weeks go on, I feel that by the end of the semester, we will be able to have basic knowledge in starting up our own parliamentary procedure team.
Immediately after our rough practice session, we had the opportunity to speak with Mrs. Diane Cornman, Agricultural Educator at Penn Manor High School. She started up her very first Parli Pro team last year, and we were able to discuss with her on the process of starting up a team and going about coaching/teaching.
A rather interesting week with #AgEdParli. Now let us hope that we are able to work hard enough to pass the accreditation exam!
