Sandcastle is an initiative of many colleagues across the world, who come together online to share about personal passion projects in their classrooms and school settings. The group welcomes any educator trying things out and looking for thought partners. See MagnusonEdStudio.org – Sandcastle.
Nicola Edger, Leipzig International School, Germany, wrote this reflection about her action research experience with Sandcastle.
Paul
Getting started
Maybe, just maybe, I’m at the end of the beginning. (1)
My first Sandcastle proposal was to work out how to improve discussions in my classrooms: I want to be able to run quality Socratic seminars. Despite a number of attempts, despite lots of reading about how to run them, I’ve never managed it. In between the offerings of the more confident students (to whom I am eternally grateful for their efforts), awkward silence dominates. When the kids respond to each other it is robotic, leading to dead ends and more awkward silence. Nothing flows.
Lofty ambition, said the Sandcastle mentors. Too lofty maybe: so smallify. So I smallified right down to what feels like a slightly ridiculous focus on just the ‘share’ part of the ‘think-pair-share’ routine. Should be simple, right? Not at all. In fact, ‘sharing’ in a classroom now seems like the most complicated activity going.
Observations
I started by observing and recording. This threw up a number of interesting but inherently obvious observations on whole class sharing of ideas (mostly following a ‘think – pair’ phase):
- Most kids in my classrooms don’t listen to each other and, even when they do, can rarely summarise each other’s ideas with any accuracy (so no wonder Socratic seminars weren’t working!). And leading on from that observation…
- Why should they? I was rarely deliberate about why I was asking them to share. Honestly, these whole class sharings were probably more about me feeling obliged to draw things together, to lead, to do something ‘teacher-y’ at the front of the class, maybe. And leading on from that…
- I ascertained that there are a number of key reasons why I use the ‘think-pair-share’ routine, and that I needed to be more deliberate (both for myself and with the class) about explaining what the purpose of the routine was.
Action – Attempt 1
But what to do about it all? I unsystematically read stuff. (2) Out of it all (although from nowhere specific) emerged a hot seating activity that I decided to run with my IB Grade 11 English Literature and Language class. The aim was to get the students listening to each other, summarising and responding to each other’s ideas. It went like this:
Task: we are interviewing the creator of the advertisement campaign we’ve just been analysing. We’re asking about the intentions behind their choices. Following the discussion, we’ll be writing the interview up as a magazine article.
Process: divide the group into two, forming ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ circles.
Inner circle:
- One person takes the hot seat, role playing the campaign’s creator.
- One person takes the role of moderator to ask authorial choice questions (pre-prepared).
- After a minute or so, the rest are able to ask questions, build on, or add to the ideas from the hot-seated student.
Outer circle:
- Take notes on the discussion in the inner circle.
It wasn’t bad, but it felt rather slow and the more confident students still dominated while the quieter ones stayed quiet. The discussion following the hot-seating was mostly a series of disconnected points rather than a collective development of ideas (but maybe that’s a bit ambitious at the beginning of Grade 11); they needed my involvement to move the discussion forwards.
The students gave me feedback: they liked the activity. Surprisingly, they particularly liked the opportunity to listen and take notes. But they’d like some changes, too: (i) the inner circle should have the opportunity to discuss the question together – they didn’t like the moderator role (they were right, it didn’t work); (ii) the outer circle should ask follow up questions following the initial discussion; (iii) the note taking needed sharing, otherwise the inner circle had no record of their discussion.
Action: Attempt 2
It took a while to find the right time, but we’ve just tried the second attempt at this activity, incorporating the changes suggested by the students. This time it ran like this:
Task: we are interviewing the artist Dana Goldstein about her photograph ‘Snowy’ (we’d already analysed it in pieces, then looked at the full photograph too). We’re asking about the intentions behind her choices. The outcome is to either write an article about the photograph, or to create a podcast. This could be as an interview, an opinion piece or an art review.
This time, I posed the questions (one less moving part) and gave the whole class a minute or so just to think individually. They had copies of the photograph so could scribble their ideas down, annotate it, or just think.
Inner circle:
- One person volunteered to start off the discussion. We dropped the ‘hot seat’ and the idea of it as an interview/role play, preferring a discussion.
- After a bit of time (whenever they ran out of steam), others offered their views and additions to the analysis.
- The discussion of the question lasted approximately 5 minutes.
Outer circle:
- As before, the outer circle took notes on the inner circle’s discussion.
- Once the discussion dried up, or when they saw fit, they raised a hand to ask a follow up question. I’d made it clear that, at some point, everyone needed to ask a question, so I managed this bit.
- The inner circle continued their discussion to answer the question posed.
After about 10 minutes, I stopped the discussion and paired up the inner and outer circles. The outer circle talked through their notes with the inner circle. Then we swapped over: the outer circle became the inner circle and vice versa, with a new question to answer.
Most noticeable was how much more engaged and lively the second discussion was. This had nothing to do with the personalities: in fact, I deliberately had more of my reticent students in the inner circle during the second round. I guess they’d had time to process, think and critique, allowing for an improvement on what had come before.
There were still things that needed changing though:
– The sharing between the outer and inner circle lacked focus: perhaps they needed a guiding question around which their notes could be centred (easily done as the lessons had a central inquiry question anyway, so I could have just told them to use their notes to answer this question)? Perhaps they could have done with a note-taking proforma, like Cornell, to encourage the jotting down of questions as well as key points?
– The inner circle would maybe have benefited from sentence stems to support the building on, adding to, and challenging of points made. This particularly for those students less confident in their English, who still held back, but also to remind students that an important part of a discussion is responding and building on, and sometimes questioning, what others have said.
– And for a couple of really reluctant participants, perhaps a role would help? I didn’t want an overall summariser for the inner circle because that would duplicate the inner/outer paired discussions. But maybe using De Bono’s hats might help … or might hinder and limit.
Next steps
The twin pleasures of Sandcastle have been the focus on iteration and the forum to share those iterations to get feedback and advice. It’s slowed me down (in a good way): I have a lifelong tendency to want things to work immediately and write them off when they don’t. This has forced me to see the process as valuable and the iterations as ongoing. With these action research projects there’s no end, only endings of beginnings, where the beginning is the bit before you’ve actually decided what to do about a curiosity within your classroom. And then there are new beginnings when you identify the next challenge, followed by an ending to the beginning when you think of a potential approach to it.
Clearly, my curiosity about discussion protocols and behaviours is ongoing. It leads me in two directions: a zoom in and a zoom out. Zooming in, I wonder how, and if, we can (and should) ever capture the meaning making that goes on in our students’ heads during their classes – do they need us to help them do that, or is that just prying? Zooming out, this little sandcastle of mine makes me wonder about learning communities and the challenges of building them. What makes a learning community? What makes a successful learning community in a classroom? What is needed to make a group of (young) people, put together in a classroom, into a successful learning community? For next time…
- To allude to Winston Churchill’s famous second world war speech: ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning’.
- Tom Sherrington’s Walkthrus and The Learning Rainforest were interesting and helpful, an Edutopia article confirmed some of my observations and added to ideas, the Harvard Project Zero thinking routines are amazing but I can get lost in them for hours and they still didn’t really help me manage ‘sharing’ any better; a really interesting podcast from The Culture of Pedagogy gave many different ways to manage discussions.