Speed Dating

I thought I'd end with a fun activity that I saw at Tyee last week.

The teacher stood at the white board with an overhead projector and revealed, one by one, a series of questions based on The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which the class had just finished reading. The list included a variety of questions: some interpretive, some strictly factual and some very open-ended.

Describe the narrator.
Who is Penelope?
What is at stake during the basketball game?
What genre is this work?
What did you get out of reading this book?

The students were seated in two rows of eight or nine chairs facing each other. The teacher would read out a question and allow the students a few minutes--not too long--to discuss it. After a pretty short interval, the instructor would call out, "Switch!" and one of the rows would shift over a seat, creating a new set of pairs. The process would repeat, punctuated by crisp, non-negotiable cues to "Switch!"

This was a small-ish class, with a significant number of students who spoke English but whose first languages were Spanish, Amharic or Vietnamese. The overhead enabled everyone to verify they'd understood the question. The unveiling of the question also contributed a certain element of suspense.

At the end of the list, the teacher reviewed the questions with the whole class, calling on students to share the answers they'd just developed in pairs. It was a requirement that each student paraphrase the last response before answering the next question. This kept the students responsible for listening to each other and for putting other people's ideas into words.

The teacher ended the activity by naming positive behavior he'd noticed while the students were working in pairs: "Santiago, I heard you pronounce the word 'denoument' perfectly." "Ali, I heard you encouraging your partner to speak." "Maria, you seemed really comfortable with literary terms when you were describing Junior's fight with Rowdy." I was struck by this matter-of-fact coaching. The teacher let each of these kids know they'd been seen without heaping on a whole lot of "praise."