Pinwheel Discussions

The idea for the pinwheel discussions was passed along to me from @brenthurley who frequently fires emails my way that have subject lines like “you might like this” or “cool resource”. It’s awesome, much appreciated and it led me to pinwheel discussions found on the Teaching Channel and created by Sarah Brown Wessling.

The timing was perfect as my grade 9s had just completed a rather unscintillating discussion on the novel Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese. Even worse, was that we had two more discussions to go. I have had great success teaching Indian Horse; students generally like the book, get attached and are moved by the experiences of the protagonist, Saul — I wanted the students to want to talk about their reading. I was afraid our discussion had killed that feeling. Don’t get me wrong, they gave it a good effort and brought up some great points/ideas, but it lacked life.

After watching Sarah explain how the discussions worked in her video, I was sold.

For our next discussion, we’d try the pinwheel discussion.

Before class started on the day of the discussion, I arranged the desks into the pinwheel format and when students entered, they were surprised at the rearrangement. I think this disruption was the first indication that the class would be different and maybe more exciting than usual. I loved the anticipatory energy building as each student entered the classroom.

I split the class into groups and gave them 10 minutes to think of questions and passages that connected to a theme that was assigned to them (racism, integrity, perseverance). To one of the groups, I assigned the role of “provocateur” and their job was to keep the conversation going and ask overarching theme connecting questions. They worked well in their small groups and jumped into the task.

After 10 minutes, I got their attention back and did a mini-lesson on how to bring evidence into the discussion in a fluid way. From there, I told them what I was expecting in the discussion this included new ideas, textual evidence, connections and follow-up questions.

And so, one member of each group made their way to the inner circle, while the others stayed with their teams in the outer circle. Students were instructed to take notes on the inner circle’s discussion. This was not something I had thought of while preparing for the lesson but had them do on the fly. I realized that for some students, it would be killing them that they couldn’t jump into the conversation and they might attempt to if they didn’t have an outlet and for others, they’d be happy for the opportunity to participate via writing in the discussion and not out loud.  

The student assigned to the role of provocateur began the discussion and it lasted for the rest of class. We switched up the groups in the inner circle every 5-7 minutes, depending on the flow of conversation. As students talked, I added a tally mark for each time they used textual evidence, asked a follow-up question, made a connection, or introduced a new idea to the discussion.

It was the best discussion I have had all year.

Things that worked really well:

• Students were in charge of the discussion.
• Students were put on display a little and they elevated their game as they knew they had an audience. They spoke to and for each other and not to me.
• Giving students a role to bring to the discussion gave them the confidence to reflect the theme, instead of feeling vulnerable representing their own ideas.
• Students were paying attention to the expectations being tallied up on the board — the positive reinforcement was awesome.
• Giving students a job to take notes while being in on the “outside” was effective — they paid attention to what their peers were saying.  They knew paying attention was important so that they didn’t repeat ideas/quotes from previous groups.
• Students were prepared for the discussion. They had completed a “pre-discussion planner” before the discussion and then worked in their theme team to create additional questions.