8 out 10 Cat Owners...

...or rather, 16 out of 18 A-Level students...

Here's the task we did today:

I gave them four concepts we've been thinking about recently and asked them to rate them from "The topic I'd most confident talking about," to "The thing I'd be least confident in talking about."

Based on this self-assessment, I then divided them into four equal-sized groups. About half of them got to be in a group which reflected their number one choice, and the rest ended up in a group themed around their second or third choice. Significantly, it panned out that no-one was in a group themed around their least confident concept, and that I was able to bring together people who don't usually work with each other and break up potentially unhelpful partnerships. (It'll be interesting to see if this is true again tomorrow when I do this with the parallel group).

Each group received individual copies of a text and a prompt-sheet with some questions relating to their chosen concept. The groups then had to read and discuss the text they'd been given. I emphasised that each member of the group would need to make their own record of the discussion because they'd need it later.

(each group, by the way, was looking at the same text, but I didn't mention this to them)

I was able to take quite a leisurely stroll around the room and chip in occasionally, but their discussions seemed to be on-topic and self-motivated, after the initial stimulus of my guide questions on the instruction sheet.

After the discussions had run their course, I pointed out that each group now had knowledge that the other three-quarters of the class didn't. I explained that their challenge now was to share their specialist knowledge with their peers.

The class then moved into four new groups (the only influence I had on the make-up of the second set of groups was to insist they had to have a representative from each of the first four groups in, but apart form that, they were free to select who they worked with for this bit). Each member of the new group took it in turns to be the "teacher" on their table, and explain to their peers what they'd gained from the text. The others in the new group were free to listen, ask questions, seek clarifications, respond with their own reactions, etc, based on what each of their expert peers told them.

Near the end of this task, I was able to go from table to table and speak to individuals, "So... Tell me something you've learned in the last 12 minutes..." and get some instant in-their-own-words indications of who was learning what.

We followed this up with a written task, where I set a series of broad questions based on the initial four concepts to prompt them to write detailed notes for their folders on these concepts. They had loads to write. Some even asked for more time on the written task.

They've now got a homework to contribute to discussions on some related ideas on a forum on our VLE. This'll hopefully stimulate some cross-pollination of ideas between the two classes as well as being a way of further checking individuals' understanding of / confidence about the concepts which will shape the planning of the follow-up lesson.

Oh, yeah. The 16 out of 18 thing. At the end, I asked them all to write anonymously on a scrap of paper the most useful thing they'd gained from the lesson and a single comment, positive or negative, about the way the lesson worked. Several of them then asked if they could also give it a mark out of 5 (something I've asked for in the past). Only two students gave it a mark below 4 - both of those cited the fact that they just don't like group work, especially with folks they don't usually sit with, and both of them had also named something useful they'd learned.

Can't please all the people all the time (these two more exclusively intrapersonal learners will probably love the exam-style essay coming up next week, mind you), but such a positive reaction makes me feel very optimistic about tomorrow's parallel lesson (especially as that group are the ones who were so positive about the "Stewart Can't Ask/Answer Questions" lesson I wrote about last week.