I noticed this week that when the Jaguar team answered questions that they had prepared for the class, they always refer back to the text, or the lyrics to the song. When I visited the Harkness table a few weeks ago, I noticed that this was one of the expectations each day. They are all expected to back up their answers with ideas from the text, the story, the inferences in the text. They always share their answers with quotations from the book. This is impressive, and it is now showing up in music class when we have these discussions. We may not have the big table, and I don't have someone charting the course of the discussion and making sure that everyone is sharing ideas, at least a few times every session, but the rest of the method has become almost ingrained in the students' thinking and this is very exciting. You can tell that the conversation is much more animated, and the students are more and more involved and in charge of their own learning. Here are a few questions from this team that we entertained yesterday in our class discussions:
Who hunts beautiful, gentle creatures?
Were they hunting the whale for money or for food?
Are they scared or frightened?
Is their spot for hunting a whale a good spot or not?
Are they frightened or excited?
Did the crew like telling the people about their adventures?
Is this a different time signature?
Who sings the song?
What is the perspective of the song?
What is the song about?
Is the song happy or sad or both and why?
What are the instruments that are played in this song?
What did they use the whale for?
How old is the song?
When the writer was writing this song what was he thinking about?
Is his wife the whale?
I want to publicly thank my colleague Mr. Beaumier for introducing our school to this thinking and discussion process, and I look forward to having more interesting discussions beginning with questions generated from the class. More soon!
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