The part that I struggled with was the assignation of particular roles to each student. As a teacher, my number one priority is authenticity. I want my kids to engage in authentic reading and writing behaviors, the kind in which people who read and write everyday, either for work or for pleasure, engage. This is why, while some teachers laud the "Harkness Round Table Discussion," I have avoided it. It's contrived. Its lack of authenticity creates stress and anxiety for students and makes me feel like some kind of mini-dictator. Each student has to make sure they contribute X amount of comments to the discussion. Some number of comments must begin a new thread of discussion while others must forward the ideas of others. Students end up speaking over one another to be heard or sighing audibly when they feel they can't possibly get into the discussion. And the teacher sits there with a big checklist--I'll bet Hitler had a checklist--and places a mark beside each name of the contributing students. That isn't how readers and writers behave in the real world.
Likewise, I have always believed that cooperative learning "roles" force the same kind of contrived behaviors. So, I'm conflicted. I don't want to appear as though I cannot take constructive feedback. But if I were going to show evidence of having taken that suggestion seriously, I would have to implement it not only during my next observation, but well in advance of that as well, so that it was a task which students could perform naturally. Except it isn't natural in the school setting. Not really.
Now, in the workplace, in small group settings, everyone has a role that is mostly determined by title or rank. The roles occur naturally. Every one has a job to do. Every one knows her place. In school, the natural sorting of roles seems to be established by students who are either more or less willing to participate. So, one student emerges as the CEO, another as the administrative assistant, another as the employee that everyone is looking for a reason to "fire" and who is a great source of frustration for others as they must pick up the slack created by that individual. And so, in an effort to make everyone accountable, teachers design worksheets that are meant to document participation. Or, they don't use worksheets, but they assign roles and hope everyone cooperates? They try to monitor that and call students out when they have failed to consistently be the "vocabulary hound" or the "purveyor of questions" or some other equally manufactured title. No professional that I know engages in these behaviors with their peers. On the other hand, we have to train kids to be good communicators, to advocate for themselves and to know when it is time to listen or to ask for someone else's input. I get that. But, I was reading the assigned text for my aforementioned coursework, Comprehension and Collaboration: Inquiry Circles in Action (Harvey and Daniels, 2009) when I came across this bit about the success of the "literature circle" strategy:
But there have been difficulties as well. The most prevalent was the overuse of "role sheets," a set of tools adapted from generic cooperative learning activities and designed to give each group member a specific job like Questioner, Word Wizard, Literary Luminary or Illustrator. In classroom use, these role sheets often become mechanical, hindering rather than empowering lively, spontaneous book talk. Smokey [one of the authors] has been crusading against role sheet abuse for years; he teaches kids to instead use Post-its, journals, bookmarks, or drawing to harvest their responses as they read.
And I would argue that it isn't just the sheets that sabotages small group work, but instead the lack of authentic training on what it means to work successfully in a group and the subsequent feeling that there is a necessity to assign roles in the first place. I feel the same about the use of "protocols" during staff in-service training.
So, what is the answer? How to keep every one happy and accountable while living a reading and writing life that is authentic and meaningful? Well, I've ordered another book to read about it. I doubt that will solve my problem. I think the real answer lies in choosing texts and topics that are meaningful to students. Of course, how do I do that when my College Board AP Lang instructional report tells me that my students lack comprehension of pre-20th century prose? What is a conscientious, highly reflective teacher to do? Well, right now, I've assigned myself the Word Wizard role, so unless there is some difficult vocabulary involved in this problem, I'll just sit back and let the Literary Luminary do her work. Hope she gets here soon.
