I thoroughly enjoyed the mini-book clubs that we had during last class, and was impressed by the substantive discussions that we generated about relatively short texts. As my last post discussed, three of our readings were fairy tales, one was a news article about the creation of the board game Settlers of Catan, and one was a pair of readings about darkness in YA literature. None were more than five pages in length, and a few were shorter. And yet, out of these short readings we were able to have a series of twenty minute discussions that, by and large, did not fall into silence. This is partially because everyone made a real effort to participate in each discussion, and also because of the groundwork that the facilitators of each discussion did beforehand.
I have done enough discussions, question-and-answer sessions, and book club-like events to know that it is smart to go into an event that you are facilitating with a series of questions up your sleeve. However, I have never formally clustered a series of questions by theme before and was impressed by how it made me think more deeply about the reading before leading a discussion with my classmates. Although my partner and I went 'off script' during much of the actual discussion of our article, we did use our clustered questions to start us off, and referred to them when the discussion started to lag. I suspect that the clustered questions would have been even more useful in an actual book club. As I mentioned above, my classmates made a wonderfully concerted effort to ensure that none of the facilitators floundered awkwardly in silence. Alas, in book groups with the public, this will not always be the case, and the creation of questions about a text beforehand have the potential to save a book group facilitator from lagging conversation and somewhat unproductive digressions.
Lastly, it was really enjoyable to spend time with my classmates in a class activity that was entirely self-regulating. There is so much that we need to learn in our two short years here that I sometimes feel overwhelmed by how goal-oriented every activity, discussion, and assignment is. It was nice to have a class period where we practiced valuable skills in a way that felt, to me at least, pretty low key.
You talk about going off-script here, and I think that's an important thing to think about, even to build into planning. Instruction doesn't lend itself well to rigid adherence to a plan, no matter how good that plan is. Building a little wiggle-room into a lesson or discussion is probably the best way to anticipate the diversity in people's experiences and ideas.
ReplyDeleteYou guys did well in your discussion leadership, by the way.
I agree with you on how overwhelming it can be to have to look at every activity and discussion from a goal-oriented perspective. Also, I feel like oftentimes there is a lot of value in going off-script and allowing discussions to mature and develop naturally instead of having a preconceived idea of how the discussion needs to unravel. I've seen this a lot in our 500 discussion where the GSI seems to always have a point she is trying to get at and sometimes kind of forces us in direction she intends us to move in. While obviously there are advantages to making sure discussions and activities cover needed class topics, sometimes I wish we were allowed to freely discuss as the adults and burgeoning professionals we are.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. I also liked the book club workshop. It wasn’t so hard for me and my partner to present. What was hard for me was coming up with twenty questions about the material even though the article was interesting. I can’t imagine doing this on my own and having to come up with a whole series of questions for an hour or two-hour long discussion. To me that seems terrifying. Why am I terrified, you ask? Because I am scared that I will come up with enough questions to fill an hour or two, but the questions that I come up with may not facilitate discussion as well as I thought they would when I wrote them down. I imagine that this will lead to silence and awkward pauses, which my patrons would not enjoy, and this would cause them to not enjoy my book clubs. I will hopefully be practicing that skill this summer at my internship. However, I will not be choosing the books. The patrons will choose the books that they want to read, which will both make it easier and harder. I will need to read the books ahead of the book club meetings so that I can make up discussion questions.
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