Occupational Therapy Education

"Blood Brothers" assignment

This assignment endeavors to sharpen your skills of thoughtful critique while using a contextually-based approach. You are to read the entire book, Blood Brothers, written by Michael Weisskopf. Your class will be sorted into a series of discussion groups with 3-4 members each. These groups will meet regularly over the course of the term to discuss how different aspects of the author's context influenced his perceptions, performance, and life satisfaction. As a group, you will be responsible for writing a brief summary of each of the 7 contextual variables we will discuss in this course, and then submitting the summary for a grade. Each member of the group will receive the same grade for these assignments. Part of your grade will include an evaluation of your ability to write clearly, and to present information in a logical, coherent manner.

Please submit your group's assignments in hardcopy, using the template I have placed on-line for writing this assignment. This link will download the template as a generic text file (rich text format), suitable for use by most word processing systems.

Your summaries should be brief, but include:

1. a general overview of each particular context variable.
2. a discussion of how each context variable influenced Michael Weisskopf's perspective and performance.
3. identification of at least 2 performance facilitators relevant to each context variable.
4. identification of at least 2 performance barriers relevant to each context variable.
5. your observations related to at least 2 interventions that increased the performance range for Michael Weisskopf. These may involve a single context variable, or any combination of context variables - but be sure to identify the context variables targeted by the intervention. The intervention may be one developed by a therapist, or it may be one "discovered" by the author on his own.

Questions? Consult your syllabus for further details, or stop by the office.