Creating Multiple Ways to Participate
Small Group Engagement
Prior to whole group discussion, first direct students to practice their skills in low-risk situations. Students should be able to engage in small-group conversations about racial justice and feel empowered with paths of redemption and reconciliation when mistakes are made.
Think-Pair-Share
To start to engage students in discussing racial equity, teachers can show this video (2:00) and have students reflect in writing about their reactions.
Teachers can provide guiding questions such as:
After writing independently (think), students can then engage in turning to a partner near them to talk about their responses (pair). Remind students of the sentence stems from the previous section to help them engage in healthy racial dialogue.
Finally, teachers can ask each group to share one takeaway from their conversation.
This format helps students engage in critical conversations in a low-stakes format with only one peer listening to them talk. Then, the students can decide together what they want to share from the class which avoids putting students on the spot.
“Fishbowl” Discussion
A fishbowl discussion is a scaffolded discussion approach where a group of participants is seated in a circle to engage in dialogue while another set of participants observes and takes notes.
Eventually, the two groups switch roles, allowing each group an opportunity to actively participate as well as serve as formal observers. This is a great scaffold to get students used to publicly discussing racial equity and social justice as it provides structure to guide students while providing opportunities for critical thinking.
This approach may work well in discussions with a large number of participants (i.e., 25 or more) as it allows time for each participant to talk in smaller groups. Students can be provided with the option of preparing notes the day prior to a fishbowl discussion so they have resources to refer back to during discussion as another type of scaffold.
Selecting Texts for Discussion
Traditional approaches to a fishbowl discussion involve learners all reading a central text before participating in the seminar. Facilitators should take care to ensure the text that is selected is a text that lends itself well to discussion.