Elements of Successful Integration

This week during our department meeting, we had a summit between the Humanities and International departments to review the first year of integration and to set goals for the coming year. As part of this conversation, we brainstormed various activities that had been successful with groups of domestic and international students. We discovered that they had certain elements in common:

• an opportunity to prepare

• clear goals for every task
  

• opportunities for each participant to contribute
  

• some form of accountability for each participant
  

• grids, charts, graphic or visual organizers

• opportunities for hands-on work

These are elements to keep in mind when you are planning classes for a mix of international and domestic students.

Wild Card Seating

Benji taught me this creative approach to configuring the classroom.



You get an old deck of cards, too shabby for the poker table, and write the names of your students on them. These then become flexible classroom management tools.

• You can deal the cards out on the desks to create certain pairs or teams.


• Early-bird students can be given the enjoyable task of dealing them out.
  


• HH refined this idea by using all red for girls, all black for boys (or vice-versa). This comes in handy when you are looking for gender balance.


• For me, having a little deck of name-cards actually helps me design my teams/pairs. I deal out my groups of 2, 3 or 4 and then re-arrange when I see one group is getting too strong.


• Benji even customizes his cards, using pictures that the students bring in: baby pictures, pets.

This has been a simple and fun way to ensure that inertia doesn't have too much influence in classroom seating.

Reflections on Lecture

Gary and I had a chat today about one of the ways in which lecture works beautifully for students: as synthesis as well as presentation.

Gary proposes that one of the best uses of lecture is to make connections between concepts and information with which the students already have a passing familiarity. When time allows, Gary has found students benefit from encountering the basics of a new unit in section or small groups. This can be an especially rich way to work with primary sources: letters, speeches, newspaper articles. Listening to the lecture then becomes a satisfying experience of connecting the dots as well as gathering information. The students have a chance to see how their teachers are interpreting the complex information that primary sources have to offer.

Reflections on a Fish Bowl

I just had a satisfying Fishbowl Experience. (If there's anyone out there who doesn't know, a fishbowl is when half of the class is ringed at the edge of the room, silent, while the other half sits in the middle and carries on the discussion. The teacher says nothing but keeps careful track of how the students participate.)


Some things that made this work:

• Students were prepared. I had told them what we'd be doing and advised them to come to class with passages, questions and observations to share.

• I had a stack of questions on notecards which they could draw from if they felt the conversation needed new energy.

• I had a clipboard with a little graph on hand to take notes. I made hatch marks under the Offers Passage/Asks Question/ Agrees/Disagrees columns and left a long-ish space at the far right edge to make longer comments.

• I had a fun, scooty chair for the "hot seat," where students on the outside can jump in if they really want to say something. (It is fair play to bump someone from the hot seat--and towards the end of class, I did.)

• At the end, we de-briefed the experience and reflected on what kind of comments make for good academic conversation. They themselves volunteered that comments that refer to specific passages in the text lead to richer discussions.

Taking a Backseat

Heather has been having great success lately by saying very little in the classroom. Students have been working closely with texts and with each other instead.

Heather gets the conversation started by inviting students to share passages from the texts they are reading. She reviews the rules of a good classroom conversation and then announces her intention to remain an observer. She even makes a bit of a show of moving to the back of the room and taking notes--and the students get the hint.

I'm thinking I'll do this on Tuesday with a spreadsheet chart that lists all the students names and allows me to check off the ways they participate: offers idea/extends/re-directs/questions/disagrees/jokes.

Architectural Tour

Today I went with the 10th grade on a walking tour of public architecture in Seattle. We visited Town Hall, the Seattle Public Library and the Court House.Again, the students worked within their cohort groups, walking downtown in groups of 8-9.

At Town Hall, students identified Neoclassical elements in the building's architecture and discussed how these elements served the building's functions as meeting place and as a place of worship).

On the steps of the courthouse, the students considered the strikingly different buildings on both sides of 5th Avenue--the library and the courthouse. They brainstormed adjectives as they took in the buildings in their sites; there was lively disagreement within the groups. (Some students love the exuberance and edginess of the library; some students find it confusing and repellent.)

They also considered how the architectural styles of the buildings serve or do not serve the functions of the building. Some students appreciated the rationality and seriousness of the courthouse facade; some considered it forbidding . Everyone commented that the Seattle Public Library seemed to want to convey a very non-traditional message about the nature of information and knowledge.

Though it took a while to get to the buildings, it was very useful to see them as they actually interact with the city. Simply showing some slides would have been faster but would not have captured the dramatic way the library juts out over the street nor the striking separation of the courthouse from the hectic life of the street.

Qu'est-ce que c'est "un cohort?"

Cohorts

A cohort is a group of 6-7 students, a mix of male-female, international-domestic and when know-able, extroverted-introverted personality types. Cohorts are assembled from all the different sections and will be grouped together all year, both in academic settings and on camping/field trips so the students get very used to working with each other. Today I had an opportunity to observe a cohort in an academic setting.

Name cards were provided so that the students had no trouble remembering each others’ names. They got seated in their small groups and set to work on a structured task, based on the previous night’s homework assignment.

• Students took turns reporting their responses to a set of three questions and other members of the group took notes on what was being said. This kept all the students active and gave each a turn to speak.
• When they’d finished this, the students were then asked to divide the responses they’d heard into three categories.
• The teachers circulated and answered questions.

Students made excellent observations like, “Democracy consults the general will” and “Civil rights are granted by the Constitution” and they asked great questions like:

“Where do Human Rights come from?”
“How would you discover that?”
“What if you’re an escaped convict on the loose?”

I heard great discussions on-going for a good 25 minutes—all the way up until 5 minutes before lunch. It doesn’t get much better than that.