I guess I know now why John seemed apprehensive about my doing group work in his class. I don’t think that he ever really does this kind of group work. I saw him have the students turn around to their neighbors and check their answers but that is about the full extent of it. Not only did the students in my section seem really unaccustomed to doing cooperative work, but they also did interacted much as Americans do in such cooperative groups – poorly. The first major source of difficulty was that they hadn’t done the reading. This seemed to have been made worse by the fact that many of the students didn’t want to have to cooperate to do such an activity. They seemed to have wanted me to just tell them what the reading was all about. They had poor group work skills and either did it on their own or got off task. Furthermore, they didn’t follow the roles I assigned to them on the cards. Finally, they didn’t understand the questions I had given them. Most of the time was spent with them skimming the reading trying to get some clue. I kept on thinking "If they were my class then they would learn to come prepared." I think they hadn’t expected me to hold them responsible for the reading, even the group that was officially responsible hadn’t done it and one hadn’t shown up.
I of course had some idea that many of the students wouldn’t have done the reading, but I would have never suspected that there would be entire groups who hadn’t. I thought that at least the four would have, so I planned on making groups based around them. They were going to be the leaders and the quality controllers. So, when one of them didn’t show up, I only had three groups, and I think that this made them too large for effective cooperation. This inability of them to do what was expected of them caused the activity to last much longer than planned and take up time that could have been spent more wisely on other things. In retrospect I wonder if I should have skipped that analysis of the reading. What good is it if the students learn nothing from it? What did they learn from it after all? How did it fit into my lesson’s objectives?
I can’t help but to think that this lack of accountability on the part of the students could be dealt with by increasing the frequency of group work and also building a better rapport. Furthermore, the students could at be warned to at least read the two pages that are completely necessary for the next days cooperative work and that they will be held accountable for it and that it will be embarrassing if they don’t.
My overall objective for the class was to increase their awareness of the decisions that must be made while writing an argumentative paper. Analyzing the readings seems to be a logical way to go about doing this but from my experience, the students at that level are not so good at doing such discourse analysis. Perhaps these discourse features and decisions are apparent to those who know them already and those who don’t know them may have a lot of trouble seeing them. If it were my class I would give the students some post reading questions to help them do such discourse analysis and then have them discuss their notions in class the next day. Finally I would wrap them up, clarify and confirm them as a full class. The class activity could involve something along the lines of deconstructing the essay and making it into an outline so the strategies are more visible and easier to discuss. I should have considered more about how it would transfer more to the actual act of writing too. The questions I got from the book, that I used to guide their discussions, may not have done well for this.
Back to the beginning. My starting time went well. It was on time but I neglected to give them a better understanding of deductive writing. I had intended to explain why our academic writing is so deductive. The outlining activity might have helped to make this more clear. Must the students always read good models of writing? Might they learn more about decision making by analyzing some poor examples and discovering why they are less effective than they could be?
Back to the group work. The students didn’t seem to understand that they were supposed agree on one topic. Instead they discussed what they were interested in. They made all the common mistakes and I caught them in the act. I’m pleased with this because I got to deal with their mistakes in action. This may transfer much more to the writing process. I could have given them some sort of checklist for formulating a suitable topic though. They could have used it to help them focus. For example, it might have said "Can you formulate it as a questions with should?" "Can you use it as a proposal for a two sided debate?" I could have done this better and since it was so valuable for active learning, I think it needed more time.
The rest of my plan was canceled because the other parts had taken up too much time. My original plan had been to skip the analysis of the reading because my previous experiences with such an activity have been bad, but John insisted that I do it. I thought that if it were really true that they learn about writing from reading and that they had indeed done the reading, then their understanding would help them on the other activities I had planned. I was more worried about accountability so I made those students who were assigned to be responsible the quality controllers and leaders of the group.
The part of the plan I had canceled includes having them finish formulating a proposal for their issue and then doing small group debates. In my past experiences I have found these debates to be the key to helping the students formulate a clear strategy for their paper before they write. The debate would have helped them to visualize the argument and thus be able to build an outline and learn about strategies from action. I could have moved around and conferred with them on their decisions and this may have been a good learning activity.