Recently, I attended the International Conference on Critical Thinking and Education Reform in Berkeley, California. My primary purpose in attending the conference was to bring back ideas for my institution’s Critical Thinking Program, which I coordinate. But I also spent a good bit of time thinking about my own classroom, and particularly how I can better engage my students. As I process the various things that I learned at the conference, I will share some of them with you in this space. So this is just the first of what I hope to be several posts.
Unlike other academic conferences that I attend, this one is particularly oriented towards practical workshop exercises, where participants engage in some of the activities that might work in the classroom. One of my workshop leaders divided us up into groups of three, assigning each of us a role: questioner, answerer, and observer. We were then tasked with defining a major concept (in our session, they were concepts like education, schooling and leadership). The answerer had to define the term, the questioner then asked questions for clarification and precision, and the observer took notes and then explained back to the others in the workshop what had just occurred.
I’ve read about this sort of discussion technique, but I’ve never really been a part of it. I found it incredibly effective, particularly because I found myself having to clarify my own thinking on certain concepts. And so I’ve been thinking about ways that this might be productive for the literature classroom.