Glenn Scott is an associate professor of communications at Elon University. He is on leave to serve as a Fulbright visiting lecturer at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, Japan.
OKINAWA, JAPAN--Assigning students to groups of three, I had in mind the usual cautionary moves learned as a classroom instructor at Elon.
The situation was new. Instead of life amid the oaks and fall colors of manicured Elon, I was adapting to the banyans and island breezes at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, Japan. Instead of emphasizing the theory and practice of mass communications, I was mostly teaching a foreign language: English.
But I was hoping that some things don't change. Despite the usual distractions, college students still want to learn, and some methods, when properly managed, seem to help. Pardon the big words, but I was aiming for some intercultural applicability.
So standing in front of a class of 20 students at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, Japan, I explained that we would break into small learning groups to promote thinking and discussion. Just like at Elon.
My Japanese students looked up and nodded.
In my experiences, most students relish small groups. If you query Elon students on how they learn best, you'll often hear that chorus. One-way lectures bore. Student presentations waste time and force illicit texting. Response papers are just so inky when the printers give out on deadline, which is nearly always. But small groups are built on that promising pedagogical term: chat.
You learn by talking.
That's what I wanted from my Okinawa class. Talk a lot, but do it in English. First we would watch the video segment from 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper interviewing "the sharkman," a South African fellow who thinks great whites are pleasant and curious and not lusty, finned predators at all. Except sometimes.
I would hand out some questions, and they would talk it out. This would test their listening comprehension and sharpen their speaking. Good plan.
This is where the cautionary moves kicked in. My experiences at Elon with our bright and social mostly-American students have burned three points into my methods for involving small groups. First, to keep conversations focused, separate best buddies or they'll turn the session into the Letterman Show. Second, toss more questions at the students than they need. Otherwise they may skim through the exercise too quickly and end up, almost unintentionally, in an animated chat about the weekend's line-up of live music.
Last, inspire everyone to write notes – good, readable, thoughtful, incisive notes that, on an ideal day, will link back to course readings and perhaps point to upcoming exams. Without encouragement, notes too often fail to happen.
And so I created groups, passed out a sheet of 14 questions and, to stimulate note-taking, offered that every student in every group should be prepared to report back to the full class with one answer. Not only that; next week we'd enjoy our first quiz.
I didn't need to say that.
As the students shifted locations, they brought their electronic dictionaries, their question sheets and their small, portable boxes or bags of extra mechanical pencils and pens, maybe some lead refills and of course their rectangular white erasers. In Japan, most people don't cross out or write over their mistakes. They erase. And they print the words again until the sentence is exactly correct and almost painstakingly, artistically perfect.
My Japanese students knew how to take notes and how to concentrate. They worked through the 14 questions one phrase at a time, underlining key verbs, tapping the tiny keys of their dictionaries, constructing sentences fully worthy of a public reading.
The hard part was initiating the chat. It's hard to say much in a second language when you're staring at your list of 14 questions. Or erasing and writing a slightly better response. Or waiting for another person in your group to add the first description of the sharkman's intentions because she might have better deciphered his South African dialect.
I never once had to prod a group to slow down or dig deeper. Never did a student bring up Saturday's menu of musical events. When I raised my camera to shoot some photos – this is what new profs do in cross-cultural settings – not a single student objected or hid a face or mugged for the lens.
Know why? They were concentrating. They weren't even noticing the camera. Much of the time, they were looking down, thinking back to the video and wondering what their awkward foreign professor really expected of them.
Six questions would have been plenty. Four might have been right. I admired the whole, quiet experience. Sure, the students did talk, but softly, and never louder than the next group.
This is not to say my students here are not funny or friendly or eager. Or different, one to the next. Take a look at the group photo. Those waves are for the folks back at Elon – for you. All I had to do was ask, one time, "Please wave."
It's just easier to wave, especially in a group, than to chat in English about the messages in a 60 Minutes video on the social dynamics of great white sharks.
The small-group exercise, to my small surprise, became primarily a paper-based activity. Eyes down, pencils poised, deference carefully rationed for every comment. The students worked with such sincerity, with so little impatience, that I started to feel responsible for the endurance these 14 questions required.
When I called on the groups later, their responses were great. One student wished that 60 Minutes had included subtitles – in English – for the sharkman's dialogue. Another noted that the segment's producers never relied on science to support the sharkman's observations. How, he asked, could a highly rated news program get away with publicizing one guy's non-empirical, anecdotal conclusions?
Yeah, true. We do that sometimes in journalism. Like right now, right here. We just hope that stories involving learning and information have value, too, especially when they allow us to test old assumptions with new conditions.
I may never see small-group teaching in quite the same way. And that's the best news of all. Makes we want to try some new things at Elon. Just bring your pencils, class. And don't forget the erasers.
An abridged version of this column appeared in the Nov. 2 issue of The Pendulum.