In September, I went back to basics with two questions—

How do I get my students just to learn to talk to each other, and how do I get them to ask the kinds of questions that lead to meaningful work?

For the first question, I decided we should all watch “No More Kings,” from Schoolhouse Rock, since we are currently looking at the American Revolution.  

To get some discussion started after viewing it, I shamelessly stole Peer Feedback protocols from San Diego’s High Tech High, which has been so kind as to place everything they do on-line.  This structure calls for students to decide among themselves what the standards for judging work might be—to look at content, layout, and theme, for instance, with an eye towards the audience for a piece of work.

Once we had established the standards for judging it, the students took turns delivering positive and constructive feedback, according to the mantra “Kind, Specific, Helpful.”  Perhaps it’s a function of how we as teachers deliver feedback, but the students struggled with the “Kind” part.  Or maybe teenagers are just cynical by nature.  But it was a process that allowed us also to discuss bias and perspective, the factual content of the piece, and review what we did in fact know about events in the Colonies in the 1770s—and ALL OF IT WAS GENERATED BY THE STUDENTS!

For the 2^nd question, I gave the students a piece from George Robert Twelves Hewes’ reminiscence of the Boston Tea Party in 1773.  This is one of my favorite documents, mostly because I have Hewes’ image in my head as I read it:

Then I just said to the kids:  “Your job is to read this document, cold, and just zero in on whatever seems important, interesting, or inexplicable and curious to you.  My job is to be your stenographer.  I will not interfere.”  And I literally stood off to the side, and just waited.  And suddenly these amazing questions and observations poured out:  “Why Indians?” “What did Hewes get out of this?” “Why didn’t the British ships intervene?” “It’s interesting, the colonials were more violent with each other than they were towards the British.”  And five minutes in, the kids started trying to answer each other’s questions.  I just took notes—often frantically, trying to keep up with the flow.  By twenty minutes in, they had worked out a plausible theory about the costume decision, figured out what brought the upper and lower classes together to dump the tea, understood that by working together in anonymity, Hewes and his fellow “lower orders” might have gained an incipient sense of equality from group action, and figured out how thrilling it must have been for Hewes to kick a rich guy in the ass after years of stepping off the sidewalk for him.

The kids themselves brought up the problem of memory and hindsight for a man remembering his youth fifty years after the fact.  I drew an occasional arrow, but they did the work.  Keep in mind, I had been used to being an expert—after all, I was just this far away from a PhD when I left UC Irvine—and figuring it was my job to reveal the complexity behind the obvious.  After all, I had training to see this stuff.   But these 16 year old kids figured it all out themselves by collaborating.

I ain’t saying this is going to work every time, but it’s heartening, isn’t it?