Recording Students’ Book Groups: An Alternative to More Testing

This week, I was trying to be strategic about my instruction by grouping students. I wanted to be able to work more closely with students on a research project, and I also wanted to hear how their book groups were coming along,  but with classes of 31, it is a challenge to check in with every student, so I divided my class in half for a 50/50 class and decided to record the book discussions.

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After our quiet reading time, I split the class in half: half to work with me on research and half to conduct book discussions without my supervision. I’ve done this before; I call it a 50/50 class.  However, in the past,  instead of a book discussion, I would have given half the class a test of some sort, something they could do quietly while I worked with the other half on a new skill.  Tests guide the students and “hold them accountable” with a product at the end of the allotted time.  Starr Sackstein writes about overcoming the pressure (or habit) to test. Indeed, I wanted to be able to assess the book groups for their understanding of their books and for their discussion skills, but I did not want to give students a test. ACCESS testing has been going on for a month now, and PARCC testing is starting in a few weeks. So I turned over to students my recorders from the Winston Community Story Project so they could record their book group discussions.

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After twenty-minutes, I flipped the class. I was able to work with every student on their research, and I had 8 files (times 3 classes) of book group discussions that I could listen to on my drive or during my work outs for the next few days. What I discovered  in these files was pretty amazing.

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The week prior, students selected their reading groups, and I gathered books on a variety of topics selecting from our school book room and my own collection.

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Students read with sticky notes during our reading workshop, noting new words, aha moments, big questions, parts that moved them to feel/react, and just parts they wanted to discuss in groups.When they met in groups, they used their sticky notes, and I gave them a guide related to the standards I wanted to assess:

1. Talk about anything you wish from your sticky notes.
2. Write four sentences that capture the first half of your book. Negotiate this together.
3. Pull out a few words you noted and talk about what they mean for the part you are reading but also in regards to the book’s subjects.
4. Identify supporting characters and talk about why the author included them in the story. What is their purpose?
5. Identify subjects the book is exploring and talk about the themes or the author’s message he/she is trying to communicate to readers at this point in the book’s plot.

Three Boys Read and Discuss Broken Memory

One group of boys, Daniel, David, and Johnny, read Broken Memory: A Story of Rwanda by Elisabeth Combres. At the age of five, Emma was hiding behind a chair as her mother was murdered. After the murderers leave, Emma’s mom says, “You must not die, Emma!” Emma wanders out of her town, and an old Hutu woman takes her in, hides her, and cares for her even after the war ends. About eight years later, when Rwanda’s establishes gacaca courts to allow victims to face the perpetrators, Emma’s nightmares worsen. She befriends Ndoli, a torture victim who is re-traumatized with each year’s commemoration of the genocide, and together they begin to heal with the help of an old man helping child survivors. Broken Memory focuses on how Rwanda lives with the trauma of genocide with flashbacks to the 1994 genocide, which are treated with sensitivity (i.e., not overly graphic).

Here is a transcript of a twenty-minute discussion about the first half of Broken Memory among Daniel, David, and Johnny. You can hear more here.

Negotiating Summary and Sequence

Daniel: First, we have to write four sentences that summarize the first half of the book.

Johnny: Life is hard, especially when you’re a little kid.

Daniel: No, we’re not going to do anything about the theme yet. Just summarize. The first part of the book is during the war. Emma witnesses the death of her mom.

Johnny: No, she doesn’t.

Daniel: Did she hear the death?

Johnny: Yes.

Daniel: Then, she witnessed it.

David: No. No. She covered her ears. She saw her mom’s dead body.

Daniel: She heard the men shout. She heard her mom’s suffering.

David: Okay, so we can say Emma “heard” her mom die. Okay, second sentence. She ran away to a nearby village.

Johnny: You know what’s funny? Emma’s name is “normal,” but the other characters like Ndoli are…

Daniel: Then, Emma finds an old lady.Muke.Mukechris. Let me see. (Looking into the text.) Where does it say? Okay, so Emma finds Mukecuru and lives with her.

David: Till the war’s over.

Daniel: Also, Mukchris (sic) is a Hutu.

Johnny:  No, she’s the other one.

Daniel: No, Emma’s a Tutsi.

Johnny: Oh, yeah.

Daniel: And right now the war is between the Hutus and Tutsis.

David: What’s the third most important thing? Um, Emma discovered the boy, Ndoli.

Johnny: Wait, shouldn’t we write about how her mother said what she wanted before she died?

David: Yea, keep on living.

Daniel: Right. Let’s add that here. Mom told Emma not to die.

David: What’s the last sentence? Emma found a Tutsi who also went through the war?

Daniel: Yea, he was tortured for information. He got his heat beat in.

Johnny: That is what you call a Superman. He got hit by a machete and still survived.

David: Silhouette.

Johnny: How about torrential?

Daniel: Silhouette is like a shadow.

David: Rwanda.

Johnny: So how do we spell. S-i-l-o. What page?

Daniel. Page 67.

Johnny: What does it mean?

Daniel: It’s means like a shadow or a figure. No, wait it’s a person. You can’t really see any of  features.

David: “I came around the bend in a cloud of brown dust with a hazy pink silhouette…

Daniel: So you can’t see them, but you can see their figure and maybe the color of their skin.

Johnny: So the shadow?

Daniel: Not shadow. It’s actually the person.

Johnny: I don’t get it. Why do they wear the pink?

Daniel: It said something about the prisoners that they wore a shade of pink.

Johnny: Who has another word? I have like two more, but I don’t understand them at all.

Okay, so this was the first time I did this, and it worked pretty well both for evidence of students’ discussion skills; an artifact for students to listen to, analyze, and improve upon for next time. Also, it is a form of assessment that honored a strength of many of our students, which is verbal communication. I am going to invite students to reflect on their discussion on Monday, but I plan to use reading time on Monday to check in with students to talk about the ideas they were negotiating during the discussion. Specifically, I plan to talk to Johnny, Daniel, and David about how with the word “silhouette” they were getting at the theme of the book about memory, and I can also talk to them a little big about the gacaca courts, which was another word they brought up. The transcript here is so rich, and the other recorded discussions are also full of ideas for our conferences and further reading. Audio files of students’ discussions are artifacts of evidence, evidence of  thinking and making meaning that is difficult to capture in a written assignment or test.

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All this said, I do feel like I am (now some of you are) evesdropping. I recognize that the recording device was a bit of an intrusion and big brother-ish. Students, however, knew their discussion was being recorded and that it was an alternative to another form of assessment, and for some, the presence of the recording device helped focus the discussion. I have to think about the ethical implications a bit more, but, for now, I am satisfied with this audio file as a very rich form of assessment, evidence of learning, and feedback for me about my instruction.