Group Work Works!

In class last week, I talked about how shy and uptight my students were, and how when we had conversations, the students seemed to be speaking only to me instead of to the whole class. Clearly, they didn’t appear particularly engaged by these discussions. They seemed to speak only because they had to, because no one else was, or because they knew it would affect their grade if they didn’t.

I thought a large part of the problem may be that they don’t feel comfortable with each other. When I enter the class each day, the room is in dead silence. I asked you guys if I should try breaking them into smaller discussion groups to make the atmosphere a bit friendlier…

And breaking the class into groups helped SO MUCH. First I introduced the topic for the day: “Mood” and how you can create conflict/dissonance by putting different aspects of a story/poem in conflict with each other: have a story take place in a rural town, but all the imagery and metaphors are associated with space travel; a person is lying in bed for the whole story, but we hear their thoughts at rapid-fire pace.

I stayed away from the two groups for the first 5-10 minutes as they talked about mood in Denis Johnson’s “Emergency;” and they had great conversations (I eavesdropped from the front of the room). Then I visited each group and was able to encourage without disrupting. Then we came together as a class and each group was supposed to present two or three points/questions. However, we didn’t even need to do this! They FINALLY were responding to each other and not just waiting to see how I would react. The only problem was we didn’t get anything else done today…! But I think (hope) it was worth it. I hope this broke the ice…I think I may continue to break them into groups periodically if it will help them feel more comfortable talking as a class.