In my country...

This week, we've had a group of 20 students and 6 teachers on campus. The students and teachers are from Jordan, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan. They're here with a program sponsored by Relief International, and they've already been in the United States for some time (previously, they were in Washington, D.C. and Sacramento).

We've been working with the students to teach them the skills associated with discussion and public argument. They've learned argumentation and refutation (using the methods discussed elsewhere on this blog) and applied those skills to come up with ideas for effectively thinking about the topics they have prepared to discuss. The topics are:

• The government should more strictly regulate the media during national emergencies.
  
• Internet companies should not cooperate with government censorship.
  

The students spent today preparing to participate in panel discussions that will be filmed in the studio tomorrow. Interestingly, after practicing in discussions on both topics for an hour, each panel (they're in 5 groups of 4, each with a high school moderator from an outstanding group of students at the local high school) chose the first topic for their final discussion tomorrow. I think this was because they spent a bunch of time talking about the Internet and free speech earlier in the trip, and wanted to talk about something a bit different. To see the list of discussion questions we generated for each topic, you can download this Word document.

In any case, we chose discussion as the format for this part of the exchange, rather than debate, because it allows for a more free-form activity that is still oral-intensive and requires all of the basic debate skills (except for the sophisticated note-taking part; although students should take notes during discussions, few do so - my theory about this is that they don't have as many incentives built into the format for note-taking; also, they're just not used to it.

So, today while my co-worker John Meany was assisting with the trial discussions, I spent a few enjoyable hours meeting with the teachers. They are a diverse group- as I said, they're from 3 different countries. All were English teachers except for one, who is a computer teacher from Jordan. We had a wide-ranging discussion, a good bit of which was consumed by me teaching them about how to write and use different kinds of debate topics/writing prompts.

I'm always fascinated to talk to teachers in other countries, not because teachers are so different from place to place, but because the assumptions that are made about how teaching and learning are best accomplished vary so widely among different cultures. Of course, this is certainly true in the United States, especially over time- witness the periodic swings between the "new math" and the "old math" and, lest we forget, the phonics wars.

A few years ago, I spent some time with a group of teachers from formerly Communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe. These particular teachers were really struggling with the tradition of (very and exclusively) direct instruction they had inherited from their own teachers, and a culture of teaching that looked askance at classroom discussions or other instructional situations that might be unpredictable or not teacher-centered. It was so interesting, especially since (though I'm certainly a fan of direct instruction in any number of circumstances), most of the tools in my teaching kit are decidedly discussion oriented and even a bit chaos-provoking; not the kind of stuff that many of them would be prepared (or even allowed) to do in their own classroom.

Today's group seemed less constrained and more interested in adopting inquiry and discussion based learning in their own classrooms. I'm not saying there's a trend (not a comparative education specialist myself ), but it was interesting when the teachers from Jordan mentioned, during the break, that they're increasingly being asked to function more as classroom facilitators. Interesting- the pendulum's swinging both ways at once, all over the world.