I have selected the fishbowl above because the students in this group (relative to the other groups) do not often share aloud in front of the class. This fishbowl allows insight into the way students perform when making the jump from being quieter students among a pool of students to being dialogic students when observed by the rest of the class.
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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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central question
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connections:
text-to-self | text-to-text | text-to-world
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Fishbowl organizer
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The front side was designed for the fishbowl debate, a scaffold for the fishbowl dialogue.​
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The back side, subsequently, was designed for the fishbowl dialogue.
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Expectations​
Students in the fishbowl were expected to:
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enter the dialogue with:
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one question​
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one text observation or text connection (from the texts that we had used to train ELA-based skills earlier in the week)
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sustain a five-minute dialogue;
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contribute to the conversation at least twice;
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employ dialogic language with peers;
Students observing the fishbowl were expected to:​
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praise exemplary behavior;
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suggest constructive feedback;
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note new insights.
Students' central question for the fishbowls was:
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How can people at Furness [our school] use intersectionality to recognize and resist their own implicit biases?
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For the purpose of examining students’ capacity to meet the particular expectations of the literature circle, I have decided to focus on students:
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“Speculating, imagining, and hypothesizing”;
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“arguing, reasoning, and justifying”; and
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“analyzing and solving problems.”
The following is a highlight from the literature circles, identified using Juzwik et al.’s lenses characterizing “speaking out.”
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1:10–2:45
The following exchange illustrates a moment during which students are collaboratively building of each other's answers to a question with morally and logistically challenging factors. However, the nature with which students collaboratively build ideas is largely implicit.
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A student argues that teachers should not have dialogues about concepts such as intersectionality and implicit bias if those dialogues take away from “core class time.” Instead, those concepts should be explored in an “elective at most.”
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But the same student recognizes that these concepts can “help students learn about themselves.”
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Another student agrees that they, too, are “in the middle” about the issue, re-voicing how “the teacher can understand the students better” if they talk about such introspective topics. But the student builds on the idea by hypothesizing that there is a “right teacher” for students to talk about just sensitive topics.
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A third student qualifies the ideas presented prior, justifies that “teachers should be trained” in concepts like intersectionality and implicit bias because “they need to treat students equally no matter what their intersectionality is.”
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For the fishbowl, I focus on all three facets of "taking in":
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"active listening"
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“being receptive to multiple alternative viewpoints”; and
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“thinking about what is heard and giving others time to think.”
The following are highlights from the literature circles, identified using Juzwik et al.’s lenses characterizing “taking in.”
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0:00–1:00
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Active listening is difficult for students observing at the beginning of the fishbowl––until my mentor teacher intervenes to help manage behavior.
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1:10–2:45
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A student recognizes that there are multiple stances one could take when answering the question, “Should teachers teach or be trained in teaching about intersectionality, implicit bias, and the school-to-prison pipeline?”
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Another student responds and is equally receptive to the nuanced nature of the question’s contingencies.
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After a third student claims that topics like intersectionality and implicit bias are “not important,” the first student notes that the word “important” renders the idea “subjective”––but uses that idea to illustrate further how “difficult” it is “to say if it should be required or if it should not be required” in curriculum.
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4:33–4:35
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With only twenty more seconds left, a student asks the group if “anyone else has anything to say.”
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Significance to Future Practice
Several of the affordances and challenges are the same as the affordances and challenges reported for AP’s literature circles, given the nature of the dialogic task.
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Affordances and challenges that were identical across AP and English 2’s literature circle are highlighted in yellow.
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Language highlighted in blue indicates an affordance or challenge that was present in AP but not present in English 2.
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Language that is not highlighted indicates an affordance or challenge unique to English 2.
Affordances
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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.
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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.
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English 2 is about two-thirds the size of AP; additionally, for English 2’s Socratic seminars, students were charged with observing a partner. Therefore, the stress of being observed is comparable between English 2’s fishbowls and English 2’s Socratic seminars.
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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.
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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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Although students came closer to exhibiting dialogue instead of discussion in the fishbowls as compared to the literature circles, students were still largely inclined to share ideas in only implicit or tangential connection to other students’ ideas. I.e. students’ ideas were still shared largely in isolation.
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And, a new insight:
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Because the class focuses their attention on a single conversation, students who are otherwise left unheard or unprompted to speak during typical class time are able to share ideas for the entire class to hear, observe, and digest––without having to compete with the entire class to hold the floor.
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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;​
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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.
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As illustrated by the first minute of the recording, managing student behavior during a fishbowl is difficult to perform without interrupting the fishbowl. In this year’s case, I was lucky to have another teacher to manage behavior while I took my own observation notes for the fishbowl. But how a lone teacher would manage student behavior demands further consideration.
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Because of the academic and social stress of the fishbowl, the activity naturally demands more of its own scaffolds around public speaking, small-group dialogue, effective observations, etc. Subsequently, providing students with support that allows them to feel adequately prepared for the task ostensibly demands more time and planning––which perhaps will not be transferable to many other dialogic tasks (e.g. think-pair-shares, pass-toy dialogues, chalk talks, et al.)
Effects on Following Artifacts
Students behavior as observers of fishbowls stressed the importance of assigning concrete objects of observational focus to students. Tasking students with noting praise for, constructive feedback for, and new insights from the students in the fishbowl proved too vague a task, potentially indicated by students’ off-task behavior. For the Socratic seminar, assigning students a partner to observe not only will have allowed for peer-to-peer coaching, but also will have ensured that students’ have a clearer idea of what on-task behavior is.
And in reflection of both AP’s fishbowls and English 2’s fishbowls, I realize that I did not construct a routine or task through which students would use the observations they made about their peers to improve their own dialogic skills. Subsequently, the praise and constructive feedback noted during the fishbowls only became useful for students in the Socratic seminar if they remembered to apply their (remembered) notes in the next dialogic performance task. In the future, because a primary expectation of fishbowls is to observe others and subsequently improve oneself, that expectation needs to be carried into whatever dialogic performance tasks follow––regardless of whether the next task is a Socratic seminar.
Contributions to Inquiry
Because the students in the fishbowl seen above are relatively unlikely to volunteer to speak in front of the whole class (no matter the context), the fishbowl allowed students and I to hear more from these students than we had ever heard before.
Subsequently, the structure of the fishbowl––in which a small group of students are, for whole minutes, observed by the rest of the class––speaks to the importance of selecting students to engage in dialogue for the rest of the class to observe. Typically without the structure of the fishbowl, the class’ most vocal students often and reliably volunteer to speak without hesitation, often preventing more hesitant students from sharing ideas at all, whether they want to share or not. Such an observation illustrates the utility of taking a "critique" approach to discourse analysis (Kress, 2000, p. 34). Unlike in response to AP's fishbowls, where a critique approach led to less fair and less accurate assessment of students in the Socratic seminar, a critique approach to analyze the structure of fishbowls first (and not students) helps to reveal what curricular designs comprise ideal structures that allow all students to speak. The fishbowl allows students uninterrupted, less-challenged access to speaking in front of the whole class––tasking observers with playing the (perhaps) less comfortable role of listeners.
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