Alternatives to Teacher-led Discussions

In chapter 3 of Peter Smagorinski's, Teaching English By Design, Smagorinski discusses alternatives to teacher-led discussions. He claims that majority of the discussions in a classroom take form in the IRE Method: The teacher initiates class discussion with a question or remark, students respond briefly, and then the teacher explains or elaborates in a way that steers the conversation in the direction of a conventional interpretation of the text. This form of class discussion is very "teacher controlled" and the students' roles are passive, which leaves little room for students to pose questions of their own. I remember that most of my high school English classes took on this form of discussion. Although we were able to share our thoughts and ideas on a text, the teacher would always find a way to mold our findings into a "conventional interpretation of the text," as Smagorinski puts it. The other ways of discussions that Smagorinski suggests seem to involve the students more than a teacher-led discussion would. They encourage students to take charge of the discussions and perform at the level of synthesis rather than recalling facts about the text when the teacher asks. Different methods of discussions such as fish bowl, (inner circle of students discussing, outer circle of students listening and then rotating into the inner circle periodically) journaling, (writing about observations and/or questions about the text and then sharing with the class) and text rendering (choosing a word, phrase, and sentence that students find compelling or provocative and sharing them with one another) are very interesting and creative ways to get the students to actively take part in a conversation about a text.

One of the different discussion formats that I could see myself implementing in my future classes is a part of the task-oriented small-group activities, which usually start of with an assignment, and students then use their imaginations to build collaborative interpretations that result in material products, called the Anthology built around central themes. This requires students to collect anything familiar to them that is a representation of a theme in a text. This could consist of songs, film clips, art, literature, video games, photos, or other personal belongings. I love this idea for discussion because not only is it relative to students because these would be familiar materials that may be of interest to them, but it requires students to think of themes of a text outside of the text itself. It is synthesis by nature. It allows students to think about the literary themes of a text and how they could represent them using items that are relevant to them and their experiences. I think this would be really fun to implement in a classroom, and students could have a great time showing their peers the materials and explaining why they are representations of the themes found in a text.

Overall, Smagorinski offers a plethora of different discussion activities that aren't necessarily teacher controlled, which makes the students agents in their learning. I could see these different activities being successful in many classroom types. Of course, as Smagorinski puts it, we can google more about these activities to implement them efficiently and successfully based on our classroom types.

-Ramina Odicho