Don't you just love when you find out you like something that you thought you didn't? Like when you never liked Nutella before, but you go to someone's house and you eat it just to be polite and you find out it is the most delicious thing ever invented and so you go buy a tub and you eat the whole thing in a week? Not that I've ever done that. ;)
The RAT Pack was recently in San Fransisco for some additonal training from WestEd. One of the sessions I attended was about "Reciprocal Teaching". The idea is that students can improve their reading comrehension through interactive dialogue with their peers. That much I like. But when they went on to discuss role-assignment, I started to roll my eyes a little. One student was assigned to help the group summarize, another student prompted the group to make predictions, etc. I've never had much success with formalizing roles in groupwork. I started to wish I had joined a different session. I had tried this before and I didn't like it. However, I kept an open mind, and it actually paid off.
As they went into more detail on how to make this type of role assignment work well, I started to realize why it had failed me in the past. I also started to see the benefits of the role-assignment - in addition to helping students with the task at hand (in this case, reading), it also helps scaffold students to know how a quality group discussion works. That's not something we're born knowing. We have to learn how to generate useful group discussions.
I won't go into the details of the workshop (although if you're interested in Reciprocal Teaching, I'm happy to discuss it). And I'm still not 100% sold on the details of this activity. I think I would still want to tweak it to fit our students and classes better. I just wanted to share that lovely moment when I realized that I was actually interested in something I had already written off.
And now I'm going to find some Nutella.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
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