Despite the disadvantage of being the first group to present our deliberation, I believe that it went very well overall and ran smoother than I was expecting. While I cannot speak for the other members in my group, I for one was very nervous about keeping our classmates engaged in the discussion, for awkward pauses are inevitable occurrences in a deliberation. Thankfully, there were several individuals who actively participated in the discussion and added their own personal experiences in the discussion of housing at Penn State, which is a topic that affects all of us.

In regards to aspects of the deliberation that went well, I believe that our introductory and three approach videos did a good job of adding sufficient context to the housing issue while still leaving room for discussion with the class. Each approach was unique and had a relatively equal amount of pros and cons, prompting passionate input from our peers with their own personal experiences and values. I think that my group members and I did a good job as moderators by steering the conversation towards a productive discussion of the criteria needed to fulfill our goal of improving the affordable housing crisis for students at Penn State, both on and off campus.

In regards to aspects of the deliberation that did not go so well, I think that we as a group could have done a better job of not having to defend our approaches and answer questions of clarification that we were unprepared to answer. While we could not have thought of every possible issue with our approaches, I think there were some wrinkles in our reasoning that could have been ironed out before the deliberation. For example, the first approach of implementing an on and off campus housing service had nonspecific aspects that prompted clarification from our peers, which took up time that could have been used to deliberate ways to improve its effectiveness.

In conclusion, I think that my group’s deliberation went well, for we successfully reached a solution with the class that satisfied the criteria by choosing approach 3, which suggested a more robust Catabus system. Some argued that we could do a mixture of the approaches, which was also an achievable alternative. But regardless, the class was engaged and actively participated in the deliberation with our appropriate moderating techniques.