Fishbowl
Like many of the other Western Civ teachers, I did a fishbowl with "A Modest Proposal." I thought that it went relatively well. Some observations:
1. Some of the students who did particularly well were students who normally do not participate verbally in class. This was especially true for a number of male students.
2. My general impressions about whether the fishbowl was more successful or less successful with different classes seemed to depend on 2 things: if the students came in prepared with some outside research or not, AND if the males participated as much as the females. The latter was not a conscious part of my analysis - I realized it later when I went back and studied my notes. I have been thinking about this partially because I might be teaching some single gender Western Civ next year. In general I have been thinking lately that (a handful of) males seem to outperform the females in my classes, but many males tend to perform a bit worse than females of their same ability levels. This particularly seems evident in my honors classes. My top students are often male (with a few exceptions) but of the next 50%, the majority are female. This sort of holds true on a larger scale - valedictorians, etc., often tend to be male, but of the High Honors, Honors, NHS students, etc., the majority seem to be female.
3. Back to the fishbowl. Next time I do it, I will make 3 major changes: I will give the students more time to read the handout / I will number the paragraphs in the handout so that they can say, "In paragraph # . . ." instead of "On page 3, in the third paragraph from the top . . ." during discussion / I will have the students draw "ideas to consider" out of a hat on the day that I hand out the reading - that way hopefully more of them will do outside research besides just reading the handout.
4. The blog as a follow up is great!
1. Some of the students who did particularly well were students who normally do not participate verbally in class. This was especially true for a number of male students.
2. My general impressions about whether the fishbowl was more successful or less successful with different classes seemed to depend on 2 things: if the students came in prepared with some outside research or not, AND if the males participated as much as the females. The latter was not a conscious part of my analysis - I realized it later when I went back and studied my notes. I have been thinking about this partially because I might be teaching some single gender Western Civ next year. In general I have been thinking lately that (a handful of) males seem to outperform the females in my classes, but many males tend to perform a bit worse than females of their same ability levels. This particularly seems evident in my honors classes. My top students are often male (with a few exceptions) but of the next 50%, the majority are female. This sort of holds true on a larger scale - valedictorians, etc., often tend to be male, but of the High Honors, Honors, NHS students, etc., the majority seem to be female.
3. Back to the fishbowl. Next time I do it, I will make 3 major changes: I will give the students more time to read the handout / I will number the paragraphs in the handout so that they can say, "In paragraph # . . ." instead of "On page 3, in the third paragraph from the top . . ." during discussion / I will have the students draw "ideas to consider" out of a hat on the day that I hand out the reading - that way hopefully more of them will do outside research besides just reading the handout.
4. The blog as a follow up is great!
posted by Crosby at 11:08 PM
1 Comments:
I think your findings about males pretty much corresponds to what the research says. A few top males outperform even their high achieving peers, but the rest underperform. You might talk to Barbara about this - she's much more up on the research.
I like your proposed changes for the fishbowl next time. I think numbering the paragraphs will help a lot, and I think the "ideas to consider" will help get them engaged ahead of time (so that they do the research necessary to make this work).
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