Assignment: Inductive / Collaborative Learning

Last week's classes went well. Despite having to prepare 2-3 lessons each day, I felt more comfortable than my first week. So comfortable, in fact, that I used two of the techniques we could choose and reflect on for this week's blog.

First, the inductive "lesson," which was really more of a gesture towards inductive teaching in an otherwise decidedly deductive lesson. On Tuesday, the students were supposed to compose their own persuasive speeches, after hearing and reflecting on some examples on Monday. Instead of giving the usual dry outline of what their speeches should look like, I thought I'd give them an example of a persuasive speech on the overhead and try to coax/trick them into producing their own outline. In this I was fairly unsuccessful, as I couldn't get the answers I was really looking for and (maybe too hastily) resorted to providing them myself. I tried every variation/simplification of the "what is the speaker trying to do/make you feel here?" question, but at best my students would only offer bad paraphrases of the sections I'd make them read.

So, conclusions:
1. Inductive teaching takes more time. This wasn't really an appropriate occasion to use the strategy, because my lesson plan allowed very little time for a collective puzzling out of the speech's outline; I was much more concerned with giving the kids enough time to write their own speeches. To do the technique justice, I would've had to wait these kids out, let them realize what the speaker's intention really was.
2. It needs questions, good ones. My students may not really understand authorial intention that well (beyond the standard "inform, persuade, or entertain" they were taught--deductively!) and they needed better questions than the ones I was asking. If I'd thought it out more ahead of time, I'm sure we could have built from those paraphrases they were giving. But I also should've given them...
3. Multiple examples. Probably why that segment was more like inductive-lite and also why it didn't work. If I'd shown them a few other speeches and compared each section (attention-grabber, overview, etc.) it would have (hopefully) become much more obvious what I meant by "what the speaker is trying to do." Really, without multiple cases, I don't even know if that bit qualifies as inductive at all. Maybe just misguided.

Thank goodness "collaborative learning" (or "working in groups") fared a little better. I used it for our period on revising the persuasive speeches, the same lesson, I might add, for which I was being evaluated. So daring. The plan was to break the class into pairs (I chose them) and have students take turns presenting their speech to their partner, while the partner evaluated their public speaking. After each speech, the speaker did a self-evaluation, while the partner answered some questions about the content/argument of the speech. I collected the self- and peer-evaluations as assessment.

All in all, I think it went swimmingly. As Joe pointed out in his evaluation, the major setback for the lesson was the fact that only half the class had rough drafts to be revised. I decided to move those students who hadn't written a draft yet to one side of the room and make them work on the drafts quietly for the period, while helping the others through their revision activity. Essentially, then, I was teaching two classes, one supposedly silent and one necessarily somewhat noisy. It wasn't perfect, but I think both sides were fairly productive. If I had to do it again, I'd definitely make the no-draft kids serve as peer evaluators for the kids with drafts and then make the whole class write silently for the rest of the period, either revising or composing the first time.

But as it was, the group activity went well. It was a good move to get both speaker and partner to write an evaluation and I was truly impressed with the partner's comments. Biggest lesson from collaborative learning--explain the procedure in excruciating detail. I'm still getting used to what I can expect from middle-schoolers in terms of understanding directions. I did the whole role-play example thing beforehand and got exasperated, "We get it already" looks from some of the kids, but they still needed some reminding and re-explanation to know what they should be doing.

Finally, a Hallmark sentiment to close on: I can't say what the exact causal relationship was last week between my enjoying the teaching better, sleeping more, feeling more confident in front of the class, and planning better/faster, but another good thing wrapped up in all that was the fact that I found myself really, really liking the kids, even the little jerks and sassy mcnasties. Some are bright, some aren't; some want to do well, some couldn't care less; but they've all got their moments.