Merely a Suggestion

For this week’s post, I wanted to comment on our classroom structure reform because I don’t think the 5-second pause worked last Thursday. Topics, ideas, comments were lost amid the silence and confusion. Quickly it became difficult to keep organized who had just spoke and who was waiting to speak. I don't think we should be focused on restraining the oppurtunity to speak. Instead of sitting in shared silence, maybe we could promote more talking for the continually quiet by bringing back the ice-breaker activities we did in the first week of the class. We could use prompts from the weekly readings or from our Sunday Serendip postings and have one-on-one or small groups discussions to start off class. That way people who want to continue talking about a topic from Tuesday’s class have the opportunity to, and people who usually don’t speak during class can raise some questions or comments to someone in the class so at least on a small scale so they can be heard, then after 5-10 minutes, we can start the full-circle discussion and bring some of these smaller discussions to the forefront.