I See Another Fish or The Reflection From Inside the Fishbowl

I had been looking for a way to engage my students in a real conversation about argumentation and appeals. I wanted them to really witness ethos, pathos, and logos being used by their peers. One idea kept coming up in all areas of my PLN - the fishbowl. The variable was how to best implement it.

An approximation of a common planning meeting 1/29/13:

Q1: How do I implement it?
A1: Just have a debate.
Great idea.
Q2: About what? (Devil’s advocate question, as I know the responses are often immediately disengaging.)
A2: Dress Code.
Played out.
A2: Extending the school day.
No way.
A2: Armed guards in school.
Again?
A2: The Superbowl.
(The group giggles.)
A2: Gun control.
Been discussed in every class at this point.
A2: Teen pregnancy.

Q3: Wait - what was that?
A3: Teen pregnancy.
Before that.
A3: Gun control.
Before that.
A3: Armed guards?
After that.
A3: The Superbowl?
That one.

Q4: Why does that make sense?
A4: We can engage kids who don’t want to talk about “school stuff”.
A4: It’s topical, and there is a lot being written about it by people with credibility (ethos).
A4: People care about so much especially if their team is playing (pathos).
A4: There are a ton of statistics to look at (logos).

Q5: What do we do about the kids who don’t like football?
A5: They are the outside of the fishbowl.

Q6: But what do they do?
A6: Analyze the conversation.

Q7: Like decide which side wins.
A7: No. That’s not fun for them. They don’t like football. They have to listen to the conversation for its appeals, not its content per se. They will analyze who brings what appeals to the debate. What examples are there of ethos, pathos, and logos? That way, they are not being asked to listen to a boring conversation about football, but they are being asked to listen to the formation of an argument.

*Friday, Feb 1 (Fishbowl day)

I arranged the desks so that I had 8 in the middle and 14 around the outside. Each of the middle desks had either a 49ers or Raven placard on it. This would determine the point of view of the student in that spot. Each desk also had primary source documents (a packet containing propaganda for the appropriate team, offensive and defensive statistics for both teams, and a copy of the schedules and results of both teams).

As the students in the middle familiarized themselves with the materials, the students on the outside jotted down notes about what they were seeing in the middle.

*note: At this point, I realized that I wished I had gotten the laptop cart to use Today’s Meet to record the backchannel. It would have provided real-time responses to what was happening in the middle. It would have also modeled for some students having trouble grasping the difference between studying the appeals and commenting on the conversations. Twitter would also have worked (@acelini modeled this here).

Once the conversation got going, the group in the middle quickly moved beyond having what they would define as a formal debate. They yelled over one another; they called each other names; they used some foul language. They clearly grasped the pathos.

But overall, an interesting thing happened. They used statistics to prove points. They pointed to the results against similar opponents to prove points. They pulled from their own knowledge base to tie in other facts not included in the documents. They were making appeals using ethos and logos.

The area that pleased me most about this process is that the group on the outside was able to pick up on the appeals that were being used. During the 2nd half of the activity, the inside group was silenced, and the outside group was allowed to report on what they had seen take place. They pointed out the members of the debate who demonstrated the most ethos, and they pulled examples of the logos that had been used. That understanding made the activity feel like a success.

In the future, I will pull in the social media component to keep a running tally of the outer conversation. I feel like that will model the type of commentary we’re looking for, while at the same time, offer ideas and insights to everyone involved. It will make the activity far more collaborative, and as we all know, getting everyone involved generally leads to better performance from the group as a whole.
Used the fishbowl before?  I'd love to hear your thoughts.