Good Evening!
You might have noticed that this blog post is a little early. This is because I will be out of town this weekend and I wanted to make an earlier entry instead of a late one.
A question that has been on my mind (and my MTF’s mind) lately is the balance between small group and whole class discussions. While both of these forms of discourse are designed by us to be student centered, we have been having some lengthy whole class-teacher centered discussions. Specifically when reviewing homework assignments, we find the discussions go on much longer than we want them too and students are becoming visibly and verbally frustrated and bored.
Ideally, we would love to have students begin an exploration in their small groups, work for the duration of the period, and come together as a class at the end for a quick and productive conclusion. However, with students at all different levels, different preparations, and different needs, this is a formula that has not been working for us. In general, my MTF thinks we need to stick to having whole class discussion for essential points, while I think it may be more practical to have those discussions individually with small groups, that way students can move at their own speeds. Furthermore, if students are frustrated with and not engaging in whole class discussions, I don’t know if they will understand the important points we are trying to bring out. However, this also is affected by class size and the daily activities. In one class we only have 4 groups, so the two of us can easily keep students on track and have those small group conversations. That being said, our biggest class has 7 groups, so we can not necessarily get to all these groups and feel confident they are getting the main points out of the lessons.
In the past few days we have tried to up the small group work and trim some of the length off the class discussions, but it is hard to shorten class discussions if the important points do not come out. While we have tried to do this, we have not yet seen many changes in the classroom culture. Specifically today, we made the choice to have our smaller class of 4 groups keep working in small groups until the end of the block, and the students seemed to react positively to this. That being said, we have not implemented any specific strategies other than to keep an eye on the clock during discussions. Therefore, I am wondering if anyone has any specific strategies or ideas that can help with this problem. Feel free to let me know what you think, any ideas you have, or strategies that have worked for you!