Having Fun and Stimulating Discussion in English Class During a Global Pandemic

I've been teaching in-person since August 19, 2020. My students are masked, and there are plexiglass dividers on each desk. The desks are not arranged in my customary U-shaped arrangement. They are in rows to maximize social distancing. Every period of every day, I spray every occupied desk with sanitizer and students wipe their desks with a paper towel. 

I've decided to put those towels to use. 

At first, we read a novel: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Or rather, I read the narrative and they filled in as voices for the various characters. In case you didn't know it's partly a basketball story. That got us talking about basketball. Pretty soon, I noticed the students (predominately male) started good-naturedly shooting their paper towels into the trash like little sopping basketballs. 

So, around the first of March, I brought in a hoop to make it more fun. We decided to break the class into teams and start keeping score. This lightened the classroom atmosphere considerably. 

Let me digress for a moment. Since school resumed in August I've been struggling to bring the discussion into the classroom. There are several factors working against discussion. 1) students literally have their mouths covered. This is not my anti-mask rant. I understand why they are required. It makes fostering organic discussion difficult. I might also add, it tends to cut down on chatter too, which is kind of an unintended benefit. 2) Each student is literally in a plexiglass bubble. Again, this is not me being anti-PPE. I understand why these barriers are in place, I just want you to understand the challenge it poses to the discussion. 

So, in order to motivate discussion, I modified a classroom discussion "game" I discovered at a CCP teacher's conference at the local community college. I owe a debt of gratitude to a fellow CCP teacher, Elliot Zetzer, who originally designed this game to foster discussion during his Socratic seminar course. I modified it for my purposes. Feel free to steal it or modify it yourself. It works. And it's fun. 

This version is modeled after the NBA. I'm sure you could adapt it to any sport. When I first discovered it, it was modified toward the MLB.

It seems to work best when you split the class into teams and keep score. And it works in classes that have not read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian to be clear.

Each team needs a "team captain" and they start with the "ball. " They have the choice to either pass the ball to another teammate or shoot the shot themselves. By shoot, of course, I mean start the discussion. The rule I developed to discourage "ball hogs" is that everyone on your team must speak at least once until anyone is allowed to speak twice. 

Depending on what they say, students can score a certain amount of points for their team. We have been using this format to discuss classic American short fiction. Some of the stories in our textbook that I have used are Flannery O Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" and Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path." The questions range through recall to interpret style questions. It helps to have a lot of questions ready to help stimulate the discussion. It obviously helps if the students have already read the piece, but have it open during the discussion. I intend to use several more stories with the game, and it could be adapted for poetry discussions, non-fiction, or just about any kind of reading.