We know our eager speakers: keen to argue, hands held high above their extended bodies, restrained only by an attached-to-desk chair. How grateful we are for them. But we also know our reluctant speakers. The insightful contributions from these students can go unnoticed or drowned by the dominance of their eager-to-speak peers. Introduced to me as the "Big Paper" strategy, this approach involves all students in discussion, permitting ideas in rough form to develop naturally and providing a visual of conversation before a single word is spoken.
Here's What You'll Need
- Large pieces of poster-size paper (one for each group)
- A different colored marker for each student
Here's What They Do
This activity works best when students are supplied a stimulus—a thought-provoking question or controversial issue related to the topic or text being studied. In my classroom, for example, students have discussed the sanity and reliability of the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." They have also debated whether girls should be allowed to play on boys' sports teams, a topic inspired by Toni Cade Bambara's story Raymond's Run and supported by informational texts.
To get started, write the stimulus in large letters in the middle of each Big Paper, then break students into groups of 3–5 to discuss and debate the issue at hand with their individually colored markers. Expectations state that students should engage in thoughtful discussion. The topic should initiate and direct the conversation, but I let students explore the avenues of their written thoughts; occasionally, I will add my own comments to the Big Papers as I circulate. Set a time limit (under 15 minutes) for the discussion and make clear the most important part: silence is crucial.
Silent Conversations
The critical rule is that students must keep writing—silently. Any claim, counter, question, or comment should be written down. Students can draw arrows from other students' writing to expand or elaborate on a discussion. They can ask questions and sketch additional arrows from such inquiries to clarify or deepen the involvement of the particular curiosity. Of course, students will go off on tangents, but providing sentence stems for them to use such as "But let's focus on the topic here" or "So what we've said so far is … " helps them draw peers back to the topic. The paper will become messy, but aren't all our thoughts messy when first conceived?
Allowing students a chance to brainstorm in writing can set the stage for an enriched verbal discussion. Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford support the link between speaking and writing in their book Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings (Stenhouse Publishers, 2011), offering that "when the thoughts are authentic, original, mulled over, challenged, supported, and debated, then they are worth writing down, revising, and even editing."
Speaking Up
Before my timer chimes, I remind students to finish their thoughts. I've found it useful to display the Big Papers around the room and instruct students, with sticky notes, to leave comments to groups during a gallery walk. They are intrigued to see conversations similar to their own or directions taken by other groups that they wished they had noted. The real benefit of the strategy, however, is evident in our whole-class discussion on the issue. Students now have had time to process the topic and offer their own perceptions: "In my group, I responded to something similar by saying …." Or they might invite a scenario from their group's discussion: "I remember Madison brought up that …."
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