My Version of Discussion: The Not-So-Socratic Seminar

In most of my classes, my students love to discuss things.  They love it so much they would rather discuss where I bought my shoes or why I like the color green if it meant they got to have a conversation. 

...Except for one class.  I'm sure we all have that one class.  The one that makes you feel like an idiot for even thinking they would want to answer one of your questions.  The class where you ask a question and you give wait time...to the point of it becoming awkward.  You know that class.

To alleviate the pain and suffering of trying to get through a class discussion (or Socratic Seminar), I have created a way (I think) to force my students into group discussions.  I'm not sure if this has ever actually been done or suggested before.  I know I'm stealing a few different ideas from other places and putting them together into one strategy.  If you know that this actually exists somewhere else, let me know.  I don't want to walk around thinking I created something if it's something someone else did!

Here's the idea:

After reading a section of the assigned novel, I'm going to discuss levels of questioning with my students.  I got this idea from Jim Burke.  Then, I'm going to have my students each ask one inductive or analytical question about the reading we did.  I will have them write these questions on the individual white boards I have in my room.  You could hand out half-sheets of paper or sticky notes instead.

Then I'm going to get the students into groups of four.  They will have two minutes to read each question the group members have created and decide, as a group, which question is the best question, or the question they are most interested in answering.

Once each group has decided on a question, they will be given a notecard; they will write the group question on one side of the notecard.  Then they will get time for each individual to write their answer to the group question on their whiteboards--about a minute or so.  Then they will be given time to share their answers in their groups.  As a group, they will have to synthesize everyone's answer into one "BEST answer," which they will place on the back of their notecards. I will give about three or four minutes for this.

I will collect notecards and disperse them out to the other groups (this way each group will get a new question).  I will hand out four sticky notes to each group and one regular sized piece of paper.  The group will read the question and, without turning over the card to see the answer, each group member will write his/her answer on their own sticky note.  After a minute or so, I will call time and have the group members each put their sticky notes on one corner of the paper.  This way all four corners will have a sticky note with an answer to the question on it.  Like this:

Then the group members will need to synthesize their answers into the best answer (like in the picture).  They can then compare their answer to the answer on the notecard. If it is the same, great.  If it is different, the group needs to explain why their answer is the more correct answer on the back of their sheet of paper.  This may take five or more minutes to complete.  Groups would then turn all their work back in to me.

In this way, groups will be discussing, analyzing, inferring, synthesizing, and evaluating.  Whew!  And all in ONE class period.  Not too shabby.  AND so very much better than having to resort to crazy measures to get students to participate.  What do you think?  Do you do anything quite like this?  I've done the four-corners sticky note activity by itself, but never anything this in depth.

Tracking Student Progress

Hand in hand with goal setting comes tracking your students' progress.  I mean, how do you know if your students have met their goals unless you check?

The school already requires the teachers who teach similar classes to give common assessments and to track the students' scores on them.  We keep track of average scores, % of students who are advanced, proficient, close to proficient, far to go, and missed the boat (our own terminology for it).  I have been doing this for each of my classes, as well as keeping a running total.

I have also been keeping track of how well my students are doing on certain standards.  I chose a handful of standards my students need that go throughout the entire year.  I call them power standards, although I'm not sure I'm necessarily using the phrase correctly.

How do I track the power standards?  Well, for each of the common assessments (we make our unit tests our common assessments, as well as our final exams), I figured out which questions matched up with one of my power standards.  I then tracked how many students in each class missed these questions.  I could then keep a running total of the accuracy percentage of my students on each standard.

It sounds difficult, but it's really not.  It's just a little time consuming.  For example, on our Short Story Unit Test, question #s 1, 7, 12 and 15 were on characterization.  I tracked how many students missed each of these particular questions.  If 12 out of 23 of my students in a particular class missed question #1, 15 of them missed #7, 2 missed #12, and  none of them missed #15, then my students in that class had a 68.5% accuracy (meaning the amount they got correct) on characterization.

I could then track how each class did on each of the standards for each of the tests.  This way I could track their progress over the semester.  Again, it was a lot of math, a lot of tic-marks, and a bit time consuming, but it was well worth it.  I find it absolutely fascinating to see how my students are doing.  My students find it absolutely fascinating as well (no lie--they want to see their progress).  Plus, it's super motivating for them.

Want to know what it looks like?  Well, here are some of the graphs I made just by entering the data into excel and having it create some for me.

This is an example from one of my classes, tracking how many students were at each level on each test. 

This is what it looks like when I track test score averages for each class on each test.

This is the tracking on all of the skills that were on the final by each class.  This way I can see which classes did better on the skills.  Maybe then I can pinpoint WHY one class did better than another on a skill.

This is an example of the power standards proficiency levels on each test for a particular class.  This way I can see improvement (or not) on each power standard.  The hope is to see improvement over time.  This isn't always the case, though, especially since the tests get increasingly more difficult over time.

What do you think?  Do you track your data?  If so, do you have suggestions for me?