Recently in PLP every Friday we’ve been having these sessions where a few people take turns leading discussions with the whole class. We each chose a week and a topic, and during our presentations we at first did a brief explanation of our topic, then ask the class questions meant to invoke thought and start a discussion among them. 

For my presentation I talked about the Watergate scandal. I had started researching this scandal a bit before we learned about it in class, but honestly whenever I hear about it or read about it, it seems pretty confusing, so I decided to wait for the class in which we learned about it to figure out what I wanted to go more in depth into. 

Luckily for me, in the class we learned about watergate it was taught in a way I found was extremely effective, and when I talked to my classmates they seemed to agree. We got split into five groups and each group was assigned a paragraph to read about a step in the scandal. Then there were figures (pictures, cartoons, etc.) which corresponded to different sections, so we had to guess which was/were ours. Afterwards we all presented our sections and figures to the whole class. 

Here is the document my group read, and our corresponding figure. 

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When preparing my questions I reread all of the sections and jotted down any general questions to form into real questions at the end. By the end I had quite a few questions I felt may work. I decided, to narrow down the questions to a few solid ones, I should test them on people and see how much they had to say. My grandparents were over when I was working on these, so I tested them on them, which helped me get rid of a few questions, and fix a few others. 

Once I had my questions pretty much figured out I started planning out the whole presentation. Luckily, I felt I didn’t need to go into too much detail when re-explaining my topic, due to the effectiveness of the class and the fact that everyone I talked to and asked how much detail they felt they may need said they remembered most of it. This allowed for more time for questions, which is the real point of these discussions. 

When finishing up my script however, I realized that the way I organized my questions meant I would likely not get off of the topic of media with the question, considering my first three were about that. I got rid of the weakest, bumping up one of my stronger questions into the first three. I actually had like six questions, but put the worst ones at the end because I doubted I’d reach them. 

The questions I ended up asking were:

1. How do you think watergate would have played out if not for the media?

2. How do you think this scandal could have played our differently in this day and age, with social media and our current mistrust of politicians?

3. Do you think him losing to Kennedy in 1960 helped to cause this scandal? If so, how

I also had a few other questions in my presentation I would have been able to ask if there was time, but I made sure to put the ones I felt I should be sure to cover first. You can see these questions in the slide show below. 

*insert link*

I feel like my first question was a bit basic and I could have gone straight to my second question, but it ended up being a good warm-up. My favourite question was the third one I asked. Beforehand I talked about why Nixon felt the election in 1960 should have gone to him and I was happy to hear people making the connections about him becoming paranoid, feeling like if Nixon could get away with it, why couldn’t he, and wondering what George McGovern, the democratic candidate, could have been trying to pull. 

In the end I felt my presentation went decently well. I felt like I talked way too fast during my information part, and I honestly don’t know if I went into too much or too little detail. I feel like I probably should have chosen one aspect to go deeper into, rather than covering the whole thing. 

Going through the basics of the whole event took up too much time and it would have ended up being a lot more interesting for my class if I had gone over a specific aspect of the event that they didn’t know as much about. The way I did it, sure they got to think about things they may not have thought about before, but unfortunately they didn’t really get to learn anything new. 

Another thing I think I should have done better is the answers to my questions were maybe a bit too obvious and easy, so they didn’t create quite as deep discussion. Everybody agreed on the answers for the most part which took away a certain depth from the discussion. 

All in all however, I’m proud of my discussion because everyone seemed to be interested in the topic and had lots to say, many people even went beyond the mandatory 2 comments, during my session alone!