Some current thoughts on class discussions

I am finding the examination of these transcripts to be extremely valuable, at least I think so.  I like to imagine that when I start teaching on my own I will be able to incorporate what I think I have learned. We will see. I am really enjoying hearing these classroom discourses and seeing how teachers react and think on their feet, and how students derive meaning from discussion questions and the comments of their peers.  I feel as though I am learning a lot from, as we have discussed in class before, the experience.  Some things I have noticed so far:

Clarity-The instructors are almost always speaking more coherently than the students.  When I was working on our transcription, I would listen to the audio and could understand what a student was saying, but closely reading what I had transcribed, someone who never heard the audio would have no idea what was being said.  What has impressed me with these classroom discussions is the understanding students have with each other and their teacher.  Things can be said in very roundabout, incomplete ways but the context helps to fill in a lot of blanks.  I think this is a very important function of classroom discussion because so often a students' idea they are sharing may just be coming to them at that moment.  It is not elegantly prepared and supported most of the time, but they are able to primitively share it with their classmates and it can be built upon.  It is so interesting to hear how a students' own idea can change throughout a class period or even within one section of speech, either because they are having difficulty refining what they want to say, or they are swayed be classmates or teachers.  I know both of those are often the case for me.

Anecdotes-The use of personal anecdotes in discussion offers a lot of possibilities. I think they can be extremely helpful for engaging students, the Mr. K example we were looking at at the end of class on Friday seemed to show this.  Students love to share personal stories and to think about how ideas apply to their own lives.  I think the most important mechanism here is that the teacher recognizes when it has gone on for too long and can steer the students back to topic.  For my own classroom I hope to get each student personally involved and recognizing how what we are learning about can be viewed from multiple perspectives.  However, I have been in classes, especially in high school, when teachers let the story-telling go on to the point where the same ideas are being repeated over and over and nothing new is being said.  I want each student to have equal opportunity to participate but I don't want to let it get too far off course.  While the monologue of 'Greg' in my transcript was a pretty lengthy one, I think it worked pretty well in engaging a pretty quiet class that seemed to be having difficulty discussing different classroom scenarios.  Greg didn't exactly answer the question that was posed but he did help his classmates examine what conflict of opinion between teacher and student can look like in a classroom, and I think he made the topic more accessible for them.  I don't think hearing two more similar stories would have been very helpful but I think the class was able to gauge this.

Role of Instructor:  All of these teachers so far in the transcripts we have looked at are central to the flow of conversation.  While students were leading the classroom discussion with questions they had prepared in the classroom Doug and I sat in, the instructor was able to reformulate and re-ask these questions to get more responses.  This is one skill I want to acquire, so that I can be prepared to handle topics that aren't going over too well in a class.  I also know that I will need to be able to work on my interpretive skills in what students are saying sometimes.  Like I said before, students sometimes have a tough time explaining ideas that are just coming to them.  I tend to have difficulty in this area and have been misinterpreted in discussions before because of it.  I want to be able to help students clarify what they are saying to make sure their points are being understood and to move the discussion in the direction they are intending.

Classroom discussions are something I am sure I will be tweaking for my entire career.  I have some ideas and most are stolen or at least built upon formats I experienced as a student.  For instance, I had a poetry teacher who was having trouble getting our class going in discussions on the poems we were supposed to be reading for homework.  He decided to start taking 4 students from our class and sitting them in a small circle in the middle of the room while the rest of the class sat around them in a larger circle.  The group of 4 would have to discuss a poem with one another with no help from the teacher or the rest of the class.  This was a motivating tool to get all of the students reading as well as discussing, even if it was a bit scary.  I liked this technique and saw its effectiveness.  One idea I had, however, was instead of the class simply sitting and observing the discussion, they will need to be writing while it is going on.  Noting ideas that come up that they are interested in, building on these ideas, disagreeing, etc. Then I would give them a few minutes to share any additional comments they might have at the end of class, and turn their writing in to me for participation credit.  When I was in this class format I often felt that students who weren't put in the middle of the circle would kind of tune out, this way everyone would need to be engaged, and those students who possibly really wanted to talk about a certain poem would still get a chance.  I also want there to be a lot of writing in my classes, and will always be looking for ways to incorporate more.  I like the method of writing for a few minutes before discussion that we do in this class, I feel as though it really helps me to solidify my ideas.  I think I will definitely utilize it in my own classes.  My personal opinion of calling on an unsuspecting student to answer a question is that it greatly depends on the question. If it is a question about a reading they should have done or about a topic that is pretty familiar, I think it is OK. I don't think it is OK or even very effective to call on a student to instantly share a complex analysis of a text or idea, unless it was a prior assignment.  Posing a complex question that requires thought and expecting someone to know their answer right away is asking a lot.  This is another reason why I like the idea of having part of the class discuss and part of the class write.  I have a theory that if a student is trying to think of something to say and is trying to form their words in their head, they are probably missing out on some of the discussion.  Letting them have at least some days where they can think and solidify their thoughts and share them later on would at least be an interesting experiment.  I look forward to seeing if there are some other things for me to steal from these upcoming transcripts.