Yesterday was my first attempt at letting my high school ESOL students run the class. Today, I worked with my third and final class (I am also a department chair so do not teach a full courseload in my district).
Most of the students wanted the circle forum for discussion as opposed to the rows they had been in. A student asked, “What are you going to do if we don’t like it?” She seemed incredulous that I would seriously listen to her and change the seating arrangement. I asked if she didn’t like it. She said it felt too open. Almost all the others liked the seating, so I asked her to try it and see if she liked it. I explained that teachers are in the business of trying to teach, and the best we’ve usually come up with is dominating kids into submission, and that even for me the open space felt scary. What would happen if I really let them, the students control the class, I asked. She agreed to go ahead with the circle.
This group was rather quick at establishing the framework for how to talk with each other in the discussion circle, so we got to work.
To some degree, I still help direct a lot of the conversation, but the students are free to comment much more. The students were deciding which ideas qualify as themes or non-themes in literature. They’re working with the definition of theme as something they find in art which helps them understand life’s meaning–something that’s bigger than an object itself. One of the students said that “cats” are not themes. This led into a lively discussion as to whether or not domestic animals have feelings. No, this wasn’t directly related to themes, but I watched as students challenged each other’s thinking in proactive ways (when I sometimes stepped in and asked students how they wanted to talk to each other).
We had a small problem with some students having small side conversations while the whole group was trying to speak. Other students reminded them to be quiet, and the small side discussions seemed to grow smaller with the reminders. We ended with a discussion about whether “family” is a theme. One girl who has a special education label argued that family is a theme because when you hear the word family it makes you feel something. Another boy countered that family is the thing from which you might feel certain themes like love or betrayal. Different students took both sides and challenged each other. I allowed myself to break in and explain that both sides had presented logical arguments, and that we couldn’t conclue one way or another, definitively, that one side was correct. I pointed out that life is not always easily right or wrong and that we need to learn to really listen to each other to understand the different sides of a debate.
I asked the students if they had listened more in today’s class than in previous classes. They agreed that they had. While I didn’t “cover” all the curriculum I had planned, we did go deep into discussions that were meaningful to the students and helpful in learning how to negotiate. I’m looking forward to seeing how this works with the second day of discussion circle on Monday.
originally written January 5, 2007
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