A sample from the final day of fishbowls
I have selected the fishbowl above because the students in this group (relative to the other groups) more frequently encouraged each other to speak: these moments allow insight into the way that students independently navigate different topics and hold each other accountable to the dialogue's expectations.
Task
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In randomized groups of 5 to 6, students generate their own questions about the text and introduce their questions to the group for dialogic exploration. The rest of the class records observations in order to:
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note new insights ;
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recognize exemplary behavior;
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suggest improvements for the future.
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The purpose of the fishbowls dialogue is two-fold:
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train dialogic language, in a conscious and deliberate effort to avoid argumentative discussion ;
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provide to and receive from other students feedback to refine dialogic skills (to utilize in the following week's final performance task: the Socratic seminar)
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Scaffolds Prior
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When introducing fishbowls, students were tasked with engaging in debate, a naturally easier task than engaging in dialogue. The debate helped to familiarize students with the structure of initially off-putting structure of fishbowls.
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After having students participate in a fishbowl debate, students had a clear contrasting model of "what not to do" when they practiced having a dialogue on the second day of fishbowls.
Materials
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On smart board
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timer
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dialogue stems
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goals for the dialogue
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connections:
text-to-self | text-to-text | text-to-world
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Expectations
Students in the fishbowl were expected to:
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enter the dialogue with two of their own
questions to propose; -
sustain an eight-minute dialogue;
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contribute to the conversation at least twice;
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employ dialogic language with peers;
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explore Hosseini's authorial purpose;
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explore how relationships affect choices in the novel.
Students observing the fishbowl were expected to:
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note new insights ;
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recognize exemplary behavior;
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suggest improvements for the future;
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write any thoughts or questions that they would have liked to contribute to the fishbowl observed.
The chalk talks display students:
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​explaining, reasoning and justifying interpretations of the text.
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"The reason for Amir regretting to think that way [of Hassan] is probably because of..." (00:50–01:12)​
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asking questions about Hosseini's construction of The Kite Runner's narrative.
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"Why did Baba get Hassan a present for his birthday?" (02:05–02:10)
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"Do you think Amir would keep on writing if Hassan said [his writing] was bad?" (04:34–04:42)
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speculating, imagining, and hypothesizing, both to answer student-generated questions and to raise new questions.
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"But then [the narrator] says that in the winter [of 1975], Hassan stops smiling: so why does that happen [after his cleft lip surgery]?" (03:35–03:42)
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"I remember at the start of the class, Mr. Barlin said that there was a rape scene in chapter 7, so that probably is the reason [Hassan stops smiling]" (04:04–04:13)
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analyzing and solving problems unearthed by literary exploration.
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"[Baba purchases Hassan a surgery to repair his cleft lip because] he wanted to help [Hassan] better express himself: Amir said that Hassan does show happy emotions, but there's always a little twitch [indicating another emotion]" (03:09–03:38)
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[reference to text] "There was one point where Amir said, "I look at Hassan like a servant," [...] but then at the end, Amir said that he looks at Hassan like a brother" (06:39–06:49)
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instructing/guiding peers to participate in the dialogue.
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"Would you want to add to this?" (1:26)
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"Aaron, would you like to add on? Yeah, bud, c'mon!" (04:18–4:21)
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"What's your question ?" [to a student who did not know what to contribute] (04:27)
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The chalk displays students engaging in:
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active listening to ensure understanding and synthesis of peer's contributions.
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"So you mean..." (01:10)
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"You mean to tell me you didn't have nothing to say? You just said a whole lot!" (05:28–05:33)
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[revoicing another student's question] "So–what would happen if the compliment part of what Hassan said to Amir was changed to an insult?" (05:42–05:53)
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"You lost me: I'mma be honest with you" (7:02)
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"[clarifies another student's reference to text.] I think that's the part you're saying" (07:16–07:18)
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being receptive to multiple viewpoints, particularly to other students' "speculations, imaginations, and hypotheses" proposed in response to questions about the text.
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"I like what you just said, but I want to add that..." (01:28–01:32)
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Significance to Future Practice
Affordances
- By focusing the class' attention onto a single conversation, students have a clear object of discourse analysis–analysis that they can concretely use to refine both their own and their peers' dialogic skills.
- Undoubtedly, of all the dialogic tasks I assigned to my students (chalk talk, literature circle, pass toy discussion, fishbowl, and Socratic seminar) the fishbowl places the most attention and subsequent stress on students. This superlative difficulty, however, presents the final dialogic performance task–the Socratic Seminar–as a more manageable feat.
- Because the teacher does not interrupt the fishbowl dialogue, the onus of ensuring students meet expectations (as detailed above) falls unto the students themselves–replicating an authentic, real-world practice of actively seeking out others' thoughts on topics, questions, and issues.
- The observational structure of the fishbowl solidified the distinction between "discussion" and "dialogue": from the first day of fishbowls to the last, students were repeatedly exposed to these two different discursive models through both observation and first-hand application.
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Challenges
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Because the teacher restricts themselves from entering the dialogue, the teacher cannot:
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ensure that every student gets equal speaking time (see 7:05 for one students' cutting-off of another);​
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re-direct students to concrete observations of the text when necessary;
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correct erroneous understandings (although none were displayed in any of the fishbowls)
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The superlative stress of the fishbowl is both an affordance and challenge: although it allows for utilizable peer observation and presents the Socratic seminar as an easier task, the fishbowl could also lead students to withhold contributions out of anxiety, stress, or overanalysis.
Effects on Following Artifacts
While students note their praise, constructive feedback, and new insights that they observed in the fishbowls, so too does the teacher, of course. Given these observations, I developed a more thorough visualization of what dialogic skills I wanted students to employ in the Socratic seminar. In short, fishbowls underpinned the rubric I used to assess students in the Socratic seminar.
Contributions to Inquiry
Prior to the fishbowls (in the chalk talks and literature circles), observation and feedback came primarily from the teacher. Given the verbal and observational nature of the fishbowls, feedback is coming straight from and primarily from students. It is as this point that both the practice of and teaching of dialogism is also student-driven, as students become dialogic coaches for each other.
Despite the utility of the fishbowl, students repeatedly expressed that the fishbowls were the least enjoyable dialogic activity. Even with increased opportunities to speak (relative to the Socratic seminar), the fishbowls' vulnerability and surveillance from peers and the teacher are undeniably emotionally significant factors in students' engagement with dialogism (as detailed further in their survey responses about the dialogic unit). Linguist Michael Halliday (1978) stresses the importance of a sociolinguistic perspective when analyzing dialogic language: "[I]t is largely the linguistic interchange with the group that determines the status of the individuals and shapes them as persons"; or in other words, the individual is "a derivation from and extension of his participation in the group"––a socioemotional phenomenon that is ostensibly only augmented by students' teenage adolescence and sensitive identity formation (p. 14). The picture is as is in the figure below (Halliday, 1978, p. 14):
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The fishbowl demands the teacher to acknowledge that dialogism is an inherently, inescapably communal and social event.
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