Student ownership and engagement

Public domain image by Pixabay user PollyDot

So, Ive been thinking about student ownership of and engagement in class discussion. I teach a section of senior English (the course is called Good Reads), and I do not want to lecture or have a forced march through each page of the books we read.

When I taught 5th grade, I did a lot of work with my class on gradually being more independent in discussions. I had all year to work on this. We started with much more teacher led discussions, did a lot of commenting on a blog for homework to get ready for discussion (wow did this improve the level of discourse!), moved to round table “Great Books” style discussions (teacher does not answer questions, only asks questions), then to students leading group discussion on the blog, and finally to students leading very small in person discussions. It was a lot of work to make that transition happen, but we did usually get there.

In high school, I think those of us who teach discussion based classes, sometimes imagine that students will just take ownership of discussions, be involved, see the bigger picture. (I have a vivid imagination and also like to imagine that there is time in the week for me to do all my work, have lovely dinner table conversations with my family over delicious, home-cooked meals, read for pleasure, exercise, and make art. HA!)

Here are a few things that I find get in the way of student ownership and engagement in discussion:

• Other classes! It turns out students have work to do in other classes too and can’t devote all their time or energy to my reading. What?!
• Bells and set periods. To do this well, I would like to have time to debrief, discuss not just the content and skills of English class, but also the skills and habits that lead to good discussion. 48 minutes goes by in a flash. By the time everyone arrives, we are down to 44. And, the big kids can have longer conversations once they get going, which is great. It leaves less time for that important reflecting work.
• The reading is more complex. If students are going to be in charge of the discussion, the content has to be at a “take charge level” which is probably lower than a “listen and understand” level. (These are very technical terms.)
• Grades. Ugh.

So, nothing on the list above is going away. I am forging ahead.

Last year I tried using some of the literature circle roles in small groups with choice books (I wrote about the set up and the entire experiment.) We did discuss what I was looking for in advance; however, it was more about the different jobs. Leading up to the small group discussions, I made a point to call out when I was dong one or the other job in the course of our discussion, but since the literature circle format (jobs etc) is not necessarily familiar to students, the jobs piece was too forced. The discussions themselves were mixed. Sometimes better than others. It was ok, but as I am thinking about it now, we had not practiced enough in a bigger group, and most importantly I did not follow up on the roles and expectations of the group. There ended up being too many competing interests. That’s on me.

Back to this year.

We are reading a number of books, but I decided that The Catcher in the Rye was perfect for student groups to lead discussions. First of all, I think it falls into the “take charge level” in terms of difficulty. We are also not worrying about the readers workshop/literature circle jobs so much as what makes for a quality discussion. Together we generated a bit of a list and I added some. Ultimately we ended up with this document, although the first time around I forgot the specific pages part.

Before early groups were in charge, I email the group to remind them of the general outline, that they can rearrange the room however they want, and offer myself to support however they need.

The first discussion was fine. Several people were absent and the group hadn’t gotten the “find a passage” reminder. They had some good questions ready and wanted to engage the group. I passed them a note part way through to encourage them to find a way to quiet one person to give others room to talk. However, they did not enter into the conversation much themselves. I later realized that this might be them copying what I do when we have a particular type of discussion. I do it because, as I have written about before, when I join in, everyone looks to me. So, before the second group I made sure to clarify that they did not have to be, and should not be, as removed.

The second group went last week. They planned a task to get the group going. It was a good opening option, but the class hung back. I finally jumped in with an answer/passage. This got things rolling. The group did a good job with questions and bigger themes as well as having particular passages that someone read aloud, and we then discussed. In addition, they managed to invite some quieter students into the conversation. Their discussion had legs.

I noticed that the groups have both chosen to have us sit around a big table, which is fine. Both groups have also mostly just lead discussions, no particular activities. So, at the end of discussion two, I reminded folks that an activity for part of the time was an option too.

Today, the third group guided our discussion. They had a theme around which they focussed our attention. It related to the section they were tasked with discussing, but also the earlier sections. The group of three took turns, engaged with the group, and had particular passages ready. The topic led the class to branch out and connect the book to themselves and what is going on in the world. Again, several of the more quiet students joined in.

Needless to say, I am very happy with how things are going. Not only are the students stepping up and coming prepared, I am able to participate in the conversation as another class member (almost). Maybe I can join in because we have other, assigned leaders. I’m not sure. The more I think about it though, I think that there are a number of things that have contributed to our success.

• We talked about the parts of a discussion and made a list of what the groups were responsible for in advance.
• I have been able to do a tiny bit of debriefing with the entire class after (sometimes days after) each discussion.
• The content, in this case The Catcher in the Rye, is at a “student ownership” level.
• They are having good conversations, which leads to more people being involved, which leads to better conversations etc. It’s a good cycle.

Now if only I did not have to figure out how to grade this.

Commonplace books

So, I’ve been thinking about commonplace books. However, I have to admit, I wasn’t even sure what they were until recently, which is odd because I have been making my own collections of words and favorite bits and pieces of this-and-that forever. I am a collector at heart. (Doesn’t collector sound better than hoarder?)

I decided that my students need to start their own common place books. But, let me explain the entire thought process.

First, I was at the Ann Hamilton installation at the Fabric Workshop Museum in Philadelphia, habitus. (I am a total Ann Hamilton fangirl. She does amazing work that really speaks to the way I like to think about things. Her the event of a thread installation at the Park Avenue Armory in NYC in 2012 was one of my favorite things.) Anyway, habitus investigates strands of fabric and text. Part of the display included commonplace books as well as fabric sample books, collections of fabric scraps from museum collections. In addition, Ms. Hamilton created a deconstructed commonplace book of her own. She had a selection of passages from various texts (all about clothing) lined up on a shelf. There were many copies of each, and viewers were encouraged to take copies of passages that they particularly liked.

As my husband and I were waiting to go to move along, I got to thinking about how collecting bits of ideas is such a great habit. It means that the collector is constantly engaging with ideas and should he or she want or need to write about those ideas, so much of the thinking work is already underway. Time to find patterns, be original, and come to some conclusions. However, too often student writers start with deciding on their conclusion and then look for proof rather than really engaging with topic, wrestling with the content, and then deciding on their conclusion. I thought about this same idea two summers ago during my teaching writing course, which confirmed my thoughts that students need to do more looking at the evidence before deciding on their point, rather than deciding on their point and then looking for proof.

The habit of making a commonplace book could help here. Then, as I was wandering around the interwebs and thinking about this, I came across this post about a modern commonplace book-keeper. So, now I’m thinking about how to incorporate this idea into my English class. I have a lot planned for our next book, but our big book (The Art of Fielding) might be the perfect place to give this a try. Because it is a long book, students will really need to keep more notes and thoughts as they read. Also, that gives me some time to make a plan.

I can’t wait.

 

Good Reads planning and more

CCO public domain image from pixabay.com

So, I’ve been thinking about my new-to-me senior elective for the fall (Good Reads). I know it is barely summer, and I haven’t even finished thinking and reflecting on my classes from the year, but although I picked the books, I have never taught any of them and I had a hard time picking a group that had some connection. I am a little anxious that the connections won’t hold up or work.

I sat down the other day to plan out my assessment overview. I had already loosely planned out the timing of the books because I had to be sure that I could fit them into a single semester. So, I have some assessment ideas, but as I thought about it later, I realized that they were assessment activities, things to put on a calendar, more than anything else. My plan evenly distributed big and small assignments, balanced them in the proportions I need, and included a range of assignment formats and types. All good. What my assessment plan did not do was reference the essential questions and ideas of the course. Partly that’s because I have not planned the actual prompts for some of the assessments yet. However, in comparing that to the assessments I had planned for my courses last year (Truth and Fiction and YA Literature), I was not impressed with myself. Last year, I had big, ambitious goals for final synthetic pieces that would tie all sorts of things together. Mostly these ideas were a little too big, no surprise there, but having them in mind meant that I also had in mind something to build to with other work, and this is what I realized I was missing.

Then, for some reason I woke up in the morning thinking about charts and infographics. Now, I love a good infographic; I used to have my 5th graders make webs of things all the time. Yes, it is possible to express those same ideas and connections in writing, but probably not if you are 10 years old, and honestly maybe not even if you are 17 or 18 years old. One of the things that a well done web, chart, infographic allows the creator to do is show lots of related information visually without having to pick an order in which to tell the viewer about this in words. It can show connections that the chart maker might not quite be able to verbalize in a way that relates to everything else, and connections that might be tangential such that they would not warrant a mention if they had to relate to a paper, but are there. (Even in this short post, there are numerous side branches that I have pruned in writing that I would have left in a chart or infographic.) Plus, the visual thinkers are often great at them. I still think about a 5th grader in my first class who was a great field athlete (lacrosse in particular) who made several amazing webs of Greek myths that demonstrated how deeply he saw the connections between and among the characters and events of the story. I have since referred to is as “seeing the field” in his honor and because I think that is what he was able to do. There were other “stronger” readers who made very straight forward flow charts of the events in the story, but his chart showed much more about the complicated web that is Greek myth. (That little 10 year old is now a young man and probably just finished his junior year in college.) Sorry for that digression.

Back to the topic here. SO, I have always been a fan of making thinking visible, both the idea (before it was also a book) and the book. So, I’m thinking about charts and the title of the class, and a blog post by @dogtrax about connections. I often have a lot of somewhat unrelated ideas swirling around in my head that ultimately come together into something that makes sense to me anyway. Once it’s come together, the initial, disparate ideas are more just blips along the thinking path, but I like to remember and trace my connecting process. Plus, I usually feel very satisfied once I’ve wrangled those ideas into something sensical, and it is just interesting to me to ponder individual creative process. I honestly believe one can practice and create the conditions for inspiration. In this case, I thought in particular about the charts in magazines that take events in a city and rate them according to some amusing and unusual factor.

This lead me to think about the characteristics of a good read. I have put a couple of potential characteristics that one might consider in my summer reading questions. But I wanted more than a single quality. How many qualities could I get on one chart? What if I moved to 3 dimensions? How might I incorporate this sort of thinking throughout the course so that students become familiar with the process without it taking over? Last fall, I wanted students to think about the interconnected ways that the individual pieces of narrative in SlaughterhouseFive connected. And after seeing an exhibit of student art work at PAFA, I shared a student work with them. Then we went about creating something inspired by it that connected ideas in particular passages. I wrote about it at the time. I was too much at once, but had I structured it differently, it could have been more successful. An idea worth keeping in mind.

And just like that, an idea came together. It’s not even clear in my head yet, but I know it just needs some massaging, that the pieces are there. I don’t know why I know this, and there is no guarantee that it will work, but I know that I don’t need new pieces; I can stop collecting. Here are the basics:

• Begin by looking at some of the potential qualities of a good read that I proposed in relation to our summer reading book (Kontiki by Thor Heyerdahl).
• Break those qualities down into some smaller parts
• Make some sort of graph or chart of how students see the book across those qualities
• Add qualities as the semester progresses
• Chart those for each book, reflecting back on earlier reads as well (good for keeping them in mind).
• Some sort of synthesized final chart–maybe students choose 3-4 of the qualities that they think are the most important for their idea of a good read and figure out a way to make 1 chart that combines this.

I guess this post is really about two things. One, my reflection of the incompleteness of my assessment planning and the need for more attention to the essential questions of the course. And two, the way ideas spring into my head, but are really the result of collecting, curating (this is such a trendy word, I hate to use it, but anyway…), and ultimately mashing things together in a way that the pieces click into place as if they were meant to be together. I know that for meI have to do something with the things I notice (to use @Dogtrax’s term) in order for them to become part of the collection of random flotsam and jetsam that floats around in my head. Once those noticings have make it into the more permanent collection, I have them at my disposal–I can call them up to admire them again, I can try them out in some new combinations, and ultimately I can remix them with other ideas so that they become mine.

Is that how other people work?