We did our fourth circle in the cycle, and things are now rolling right along. These circles, which are covered in an earlier post, involve me and the kids sitting around in the circle talking to each other. The kids are all pretty used to the routine, and I keep coming up with ways to relate it to what we are learning. It isn’t going to stop any time soon, so what better time for a little update!

Structure

Each circle begins with a chairs in a circle, a talking piece (a ball or something), and each kid has a white board, a marker, and recently erasers. I sit near a piece of chart paper for to writing down the results of each students question to the group.

My prompts have involved kids asking questions of each other. So far I have done:

  • Week 1: What is a yes or no question you want to ask everyone, and predict whether 5%, 15%, 50%, 85% or 95% of the people will say yes.
  • Week 2-3: What is a question on a scale of 1 -10 you want to ask everyone, and predict what number people will say the most.
  • Week 4: What is a question on a scale of 1 -10 you want to ask everyone, and predict the distribution: skewed left, symmetric, skewed right.

These simple prompts lead to authentic responses. The questions asked are genuine in that they are from the people in the room, and the answers are genuine because they are from the people in the room. When it is time to work with other data, it helps to be able to pull examples from the chart paper that we all had a part in creating. Today for example, when I talked about the z-score, it was nice to use a question from the circle as an example instead of ‘dinosaur femurs’ or whatever.

Strategies

I have done this enough now that I am starting to get some strategies that help. One thing is that I want to control who all is talking a lot. Having the talking piece let’s kids know who is supposed to be talking. After everyone shows the results, and as I am writing on the chart paper, I’ll pick someone who had the highest or the lowest number and ask them why they said what they said. I can also use this as a way to have some kind of equity in who controls the airspace. I’ve also had a bunch of sample questions on the wall so that when kids inevitably say they don’t have a question, they can just pick one of the other ones. The question I was using were from the Census At School, since we are going to eventually use that data.

Next steps

So the thing that I want to work on is how to keep expanding so that at the end the circle will be a way for people to share their final projects and get feedback from their peers. For that I need to figure out a number of things like making sure the kids are comfortable listening to each other, and responding respectfully. I’ll also need to finish making my project. 

The other big thing is how much class time this takes. Seeing up the room so that we can get right into the circle is important. When we’re finished kids should quickly transition out of the circle and back to their tables. To make transitions quicker I have students pick up their folder or laptop or the next activity as they leave the circle. Another struggle is also writing the data and also facilitating the group. Maybe a student could keep track of writing the numbers that are produced after each question, but without making that kid feel left out. The white boards also seem like a ripe opportunity for student creativity, and currently all students do is write one number, and then erase it.

All in all, it’s going pretty well. I look forward to writing another follow up at the end of the cycle. If you have any ideas or thoughts, please let me know in the comments!