Harkness Discussion Update 11/4/09

[Gayle Brooks]

My students have been reading The Waste Land and I wasn't sure how the discussions were going to go with a complex text like this. However, much to my surprise, the girls are becoming quite astute with their discussions and have actually enjoyed reading The Waste Land! I am fully committed to this way of "teaching" after the experience with this text. Below is a diagram outlining the discussion path during one discussion on The Waste Land. As you can see, it's quite balanced and proved to be a prolific discussion:

This discussion scored an 11.5 out of 12 points, and was their highest scored discussion to date. Two of the three very quiet students stepped up their participation during The Waste Land discussions. Another area of significant improvement is that students question each other more, either for textual evidence to support their opinion, or to ask for clarification, or to disagree. They have become more comfortable challenging each other's perspective and supporting their own.

I continue to tweak the table evaluation form to fit my needs. This may mostly have to do with my pursuit of "clean categories" for questions and comments. I find that some questions and comments are hard to categorize and I want to be sure that I'm consistent when I tally them.So I find that I revise the form and add certain categories of comments (i.e. if a student disagrees with another's interpretation) to make the distinction.

My next steps are to have the students review their taped discussions (one at the beginning of the 1st quarter and one at the end), so they can see where they have improved and where they still need work. Also, I'm going to begin giving individual participation grades based on individual evaluations that the students and I complete during each discussion. Right now I think I'm going to assign a grade at the end of the quarter, which will be an average score of all of their evaluations since there is no set number for each student. We'll see how it goes. Overall though, I'm very happy with the Harkness discussions that have taken place in my class. I intend to adapt it for my 10th graders, which will be an experience. I'm not sure how it will work at that level, but we'll see.