Description
Just this morning I put the finishing touches on an article I am writing for the English Journal entitled: “Covid Killed the Classroom Discussion & the Gamified Panacea.”
Not sure about your students, but mine don’t do much of anything but make cricket noises and count ceiling tiles during the typical discussion modalities (Fishbowl, Socratic Seminar, Harkness Discussion).
But in saying that, I have had tremendous success with a gamified/edutainment approach that goes by the name of the Plato’s Play-Doh Discussion.
Today’s video explores how I run something that I call the “Poetic 5th.”
What we do is study five poems by a particular author (Billy Collins in this instance) and gamify a student-led discussion.
The bulk of the questions are generated by the students (and they asked some zingers for these poems) and I only chime in if they’ve overlooked something crucial (they didn’t pick up on Collins’ syntactical trickerations for the most part).
In brief, I ran a gamified quasi-stations activity in which there was a Jenga at one station, Hungry Hippos at another, Tic-Tak-Toe on the whiteboard, Connect Four – we even had ring toss.
Super fun … but of more importance … everyone was engaged and learning at a high level.
The video shines a spotlight on the questions students posed for “On Turning Ten” and “Introduction to Poetry” … but you can download all of the questions and guidelines for the selected five poems in the video’s description (Down Below).
I highly recommend giving a Plato’s Play-Doh Discussion a whirl if your classroom discussions are faltering.
Any questions, drop me a line at teachingwritingcoach@gmail.com
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