Coetail Final Project: 27 March 2010

Thanks to one of my teammates I implemented a new dimension to our book clubs last week. As I have mentioned before, students book club participation was quite good. I was impressed by their preparation and by their level of examination and analysis of their shared texts. However, they are limited by their age/experience and can't always get to some of the key issues in a novel the way they could with some teacher guidance.

During book club meetings, I have always floated and, though mostly listening, offered suggestions to deepen the conversations. This is interesting but limited in that I want to hear more and, in some cases, draw students' ideas out more. As a student I have never liked someone dropping in and adding their two cents to a conversation that has been moving along just fine without them, so I have tried to avoid doing it too much as a teacher. Nevertheless, a teacher can guide a discussion in a way that a group of 12 year olds cannot.

So back to the "new dimension". Following my colleague's example, I set up a chat on todaysmeet for each book club (after previously giving them play tim on the chat site the day before). I had explained the guidelines and why I was using chat with them instead of the usual format, so the day of the discussions we just got started. I was pretty happy with the result.

I was able to:

• meet with individual groups for extended amounts of time;
• participate when I thought it was advantageous;
• participate with them without being a drop-in;
• draw out bigger ideas from students who had the germ of an interesting topic;
• just simply listen for a while without any interruption;
• get a transcript of all the virtual discussions;
• review those for topics for whole class discussion at a later time;
• and get a better sense of the body of group's discussion.

It was a positive experience in many ways, but possibly the most interesting was the follow-up whole class discussion. I was curious about students' reactions to the format. In both classes, about 41 out of 45 students liked using chat. About 36 of 45 said we should use it occasionally (that was my suggestion because I would not use it exclusively in place of face-to-face). [This next one is most interesting to me because to me it shows they understand the different levels of communication offered by face-to-face interactions.] All of them agreed that they had better discussions about the important aspects of the novel face to face.

They cited the things you would expect...spontaneity, flow, limits of typing speed etc. All in all, though, I was pretty happy to have a new tool to use.