The Carousel and Composition
This morning’s carousel activities went well in my active learning composition classes. Having designed a few, participated in a few, and observed a few, I hoped I had a better idea of how to execute one effectively. The idea of the carousel is that a set of questions is placed around the room, in my case at the four tables where my four groups of students in both classes sit. Each group has time to address the prompt at their first table with responses on the glass board before it moves on to the next table’s prompt where it can add to or comment on the previous group’s response. Each group eventually has rotated to each of the four prompts before returning to its original spot.
What has struck me in the past about this exercise is that the nature of the prompts should fit the class time and the exercise itself should fit the space since a lot of people will be moving around, all of which is very effective when these parameters are accounted for and a bit frustrating when they aren’t or can’t be accounted for. I was confident about our space in our active learning classroom and so I was left with the task of creating pertinent prompts that could be reasonably addressed during our 50-minute class time and still allow time afterwards for discussion. In effect, they were simple but apt:
What strengths do you see in your writing?
What weaknesses would you like to address in your writing this semester?
What rules about grammar or writing have you been taught?
How do you see a better quality of writing serving you in the future in your college or beyond?
We considered their previous instruction in writing first so that we could address the perennial difficulties, some of which showed up in their list of weaknesses, and so that we could dismiss those “rules” that have become archaic or which simply served as training wheels until they established themselves as more confident writers.
Among their weaknesses they fairly listed procrastination and a lack of motivation along with their (hardly surprising) nagging issues of grammar and punctuation. Among their strengths they listed their ability to organize, their willingness to write multiple drafts, and their vocabulary. As to the usefulness of the enterprise to them, as I might have expected, they identified their imminent need to write applications for jobs, proposals, and graduate schools, among other points. In any event, this was the first time for me that the exercise went smoothly and produced satisfactory results and all in a timely manner.
