PART 1: My Experience With a Group Project
I love group projects if everyone in the group is as committed to the project as I am. I think that collaboration adds another layer to the learning process that cannot be reproduced in a situation where everyone is working individually and independently.
One of my favorite group learning experiences was creating a presentation with a team of educators for the Texas Education Agency (TEA). I was a part of the first Teacher Leadership Fellowship (TLF) led by TEA, and one of our assignments for the fellowship was to create a presentation that represented the research and findings from our working group.
My particular working group held focus groups with current classroom teachers, and our objective was to analyze how teachers really spend their time. We also sought to discover what things “wasted” teacher time and what teachers thought we could do about the lack of time we all seem to have.
We each held our own focus groups, and TEA divided our data into different groupings for us. We then divided the work; however, we helped each other along the way. We coded the information, created themes, and outlined our findings. After we were certain of the wordings of our findings, we created recommendations. This was after we had spent months and months researching the topic of teacher time.
What Went Well
We were all dedicated to the project, so everyone worked very hard. We all had assigned roles, and each of us understood what that role entailed. We had the roles divided equally, so no one had too much to do. This was also a topic about which we were all passionate! However, the most important and positive aspect of this project might have been that it was going to be put to actual use in a real-world situation. We were able to present our project to the Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, and the information gathered was used to inform the Texas Legislature about necessary bill proposals.
What Did Not Work
We did not have a designated leader of the group. Toward the end, we did choose a spokesperson, and there was an unofficial leader, but there was no one actually designated to lead and keep us on track. We were so excited about this project and the possible implications that we often found ourselves on a tangent.
Our objective was originally too broad; we ended up having two very distinct lines of inquiry, so we had to narrow the scope for our presentation. We originally started off researching teacher time and how we could minimize the extra work and duties that take up so much of that time. We then began to contemplate what a teacher time study would like and how we could practically create one. Our final presentation ended up highlighting the time study and giving our recommendations for how to actually implement one. We had research on teacher time, extra work, and teacher suggestions on how to reduce the workload, but we ultimately decided to stick with the time study for the presentation.
How Would I Improve a Similar Learning Experience for My Students?
The next time I assign a group project, I am going to assign students roles. Each student will have a role, and they will be evaluated on their fulfillment of that role. I will also make sure that the objective is clear and straightforward. I will conduct frequent checks to make sure that students are staying on track. Collaborating with a group generates ideas, but sometimes those ideas entice us to move our focus from the main goals of the project.
PART 2: Social Values and Social Justice
I love that when we use the Role Play model in a classroom, we can encourage students to look at the world from a completely different perspective. We can cultivate their social values and encourage them to see the world through the eyes of others, and the ability to see the world through the eyes of others is a formidable advantage in the quest for equity and social justice. As educators, our instruction should include safe spaces for people to explore those perspectives.
What Should be Done in Our Instruction?
As an ELA instructor, I need to provide literature from multiple perspectives and then allow students to share their thoughts, fears, options, and rebuttals. I need to create an environment where students can be who they are, messy backgrounds and all.
Fishbowl Discussion/Debate
I teach 7th grade English in Texas, and almost every 7th grader in our state reads The Outsiders. It is a “rite of passage” novel that is essentially a rite of passage for junior high students. The story of Ponyboy and Johnny is told to countless 12- and 13-year-olds every year. The beautiful themes range from loyalty to socioeconomic struggles to loss of childhood innocence. These are subjects that matter to all of us; however, junior high is the time where these issues become more blatant and apparent.
A Fishbowl Discussion on The Outsiders would give the entire class the opportunity to explore the messages found in the novel, and in an ideal situation, the questions would be generated by the students themselves. After reading the novel in its entirety, students would create questions based on previous class discussions, theme study, and sentence stems that could lead them to use their higher order thinking skills.
However, for the sake of illustration, these are discussion questions that could prove effective:
Why does the novel’s depiction of adolescents still ring true today?
Why is the battle between the social classes useless?
I would arrange the majority of the desks in my room around the outside walls. 8 desks would be placed in the middle of the room. The middle desks would be reserved for the speakers, and they would be the first ones to address our topic. Since my classes tend to need constant movement and change in order to stay fully engaged, we would rotate the speakers every 8 minutes. This would give us 4 rotations, and that would allow for even my largest classes to participate as both speakers and observers. The first 10 minutes of class would be focused on preparation, and the last 10 minutes would be a time of debriefing.
Each student would have a chance to be a speaker and an observer. In order to have everyone participate, this activity would be for a grade. Any student who wished to not speak out loud in the inner circle would be allowed to email questions to a designated student. The designated student could verbalize the questions or answers. (This is necessary in my classes that contain students who are at various levels of English proficiency or anxiety. Also, this would not be a permanent solution. Eventually, all students would be encouraged to speak up and participate.)
Students would assess themselves during the fishbowl activity using a rubric like this one provided by RHS Content Literacies:
Students would be graded on asking questions, answering questions, and taking notes. A worksheet for notetaking will be given to each student; this worksheet will need to be completed by the end of the class period. The worksheet would resemble this excerpt from the English Department of the University of Washington:
Clear guidelines, sentence stems, and an encouraging environment should help all students feel safe and confident enough to be actively engaged in this activity.
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