Student Roles in the Classroom

As you know, a lot of recent thought in education has gone into shifting emphasis away from teachers in the classroom and towards the students. Not surprisingly, it turns out that giving the students an active role helps them learn. If students are given some responsibility in the classroom, the information they process while on task tends to sink in.

Adina has been assigning her students jobs in the classroom for quite a while now. This enables her to step away from the center of attention and the students are able to step up.

The various roles are as follows: Facilitator, Recorder and Researcher and they are fairly self-explanatory.

The Facilitator takes responsibility for leading the discussion. He or she comes to class prepared with open-ended questions or structured activities designed to highlight key ideas and keep a conversation moving.

The Researcher takes responsibility for tracking questions that come up during class and does some quick research at home to find the answers. (For example, you might find yourself needing to know: who was the US Ambassador to the USSR during the Moscow Show Trials?)

The Recorder takes notes during the discussion. There are a couple of ways you can develop this role. It's most effective if you leave time at the end of the class for the Recorder to summarize out loud the main points of the conversation. This provides an opportunity to reinforce certain ideas...or to bring out ideas which didn't emerge. If you want to go Totally Crazy, you can also ask the Recorder to type up a quick summary which you can upload on your Teacher Page. This not only offers the students an opportunity to make a measurable contribution to the class, but also creates a written record of the discussion, useful for test review and perhaps for students beginning an analytic essay.

Adina is so organized that she has this all sorted out at the beginning of the quint. This way, students know what to expect and the rotation of roles is built in.

Date	Discussion topic	Facilitator	Recorder	Researcher
9/17	Agam. to 121	Austen K	Quinn F	Alex R
9/18	Agam. to 141	Will O.	Ann	Hanah
9/19	Agam. To 158	Wren	Hannah	Ranleigh
9/22	Agam. Done	Lulu	William	Brisa

Whoa!

(By the way, from 1936-1938, the US ambassador to the USSR was Joseph Davies, whom Historian Tim Tzouliadis has taken to task for his "glittering obliviousness.")