The Best Class You Never Taught

How Spider Web Discussion Can Turn Students into Learning Leaders

Alexis Wiggins

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781416624714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

The best classes have a life of their own, powered by student-led conversations that explore texts, ideas, and essential questions. In these classes, the teacher's role shifts from star player to observer and coach as the students

• Think critically,
• Work collaboratively,
• Participate fully,
• Behave ethically,
• Ask and answer high-level questions,
• Support their ideas with evidence, and
• Evaluate and assess their own work.

The Spider Web Discussion is a simple technique that puts this kind of class within every teacher's reach. The name comes from the weblike diagram the observer makes to record interactions as students actively participate in the discussion, lead and support one another's learning, and build community. It's proven to work across all subject areas and with all ages, and you only need a little know-how, a rubric, and paper and pencil to get started. As students practice Spider Web Discussion, they become stronger communicators, more empathetic teammates, better problem solvers, and more independent learners—college and career ready skills that serve them well in the classroom and beyond.

Educator Alexis Wiggins provides a step-by-step guide for the implementation of Spider Web Discussion, covering everything from introducing the technique to creating rubrics for discussion self-assessment to the nuts-and-bolts of charting the conversations and using the data collected for formative assessment. She also shares troubleshooting tips, ideas for assessment and group grading, and the experiences of real teachers and students who use the technique to develop and share content knowledge in a way that's both revolutionary and truly inspiring.

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Chapter 1

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Why We Need Spider Webbers

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Karen graduated first in her class from Yale and went on to get her MBA from Harvard Business School. She was given the chance to publish some of her research while at Harvard, which led to an offer to head a multinational bank's institute on leadership. She packed her bags and moved halfway across the world to oversee the leadership branch of the bank's corporate offices. Part of her job was to travel the region to conduct interviews and surveys with industry leaders to learn and understand the hallmarks of leadership and to determine some of the personal and professional challenges keeping talented leaders, especially women, from top leadership tracks. In addition to this work, she was tasked with recruiting and hiring the best and brightest candidates for research and development work—keeping in mind that the best candidates on paper may not have key interpersonal skills.

Karen realized quickly that applicants' résumés were not helpful in determining who would be the best hires. She had a host of candidates from topnotch business schools to choose from, but many applicants lacked the sophisticated, nuanced communication skills needed in corporate leadership. She began to look for only two things in potential hires: excellent written and oral communication skills. Karen felt that new hires could learn the business of banking on the job, but the skills of asking good questions, listening, and communicating were invaluable to her team and she did not have the resources to teach these skills. The company needed employees who had honed their communication and social skills; the rest of their résumé was just window dressing.

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Consider the following four excerpts from articles in the news media between the years 2013–2015, and see if you can spot the common thread:

Being able to read the room is such a crucial skill, adds Phunware sales executive Mike Snavely, that he's willing to hire people who don't know much about technology if they have a gift for relating to other people. (Anders, 2005, p. 2)

What we care about is … do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what's critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power. (Laszlo Bock [Google] in Friedman, 2014, p. SR11)

You no longer have that strict hierarchical culture in the cockpit, where the captain was king and everyone blindly followed his orders. It's team oriented nowadays. (Brennan, 2013, p. TR3)

Young people have not been well prepared for adult life today unless they are comfortable and well practiced in addressing collaboratively the kinds of problems and objectives that 21st century life poses. (Kuhn, 2015, p. 51)

These articles range in focus from hiring in the technology sector to aviation safety to education research, but they all highlight one key point: today's jobs demand effective collaboration. Today's most competitive jobs go to candidates who can both lead and listen, innovate and question, see the big picture as well as the small details.

Are we doing this? Not that well. Unfortunately, we in education are prone to thinking that simply imposing a new structure or method will produce positive results. Those of us working in K–12 settings know this story well: in an effort to improve learning, many schools or districts decide to promote a new initiative, such as Socratic seminar, the Workshop Model, or an iPad for every student, and offer some initial training and follow up with a handful of meetings. But that is usually it. We seldom perform action research to test whether our initiative is effective at improving student learning. We rarely offer tiered, multifaceted, well-designed professional development to support the teaching faculty and administrators in how best to carry out the initiative over time. And, sadly, most of us have experienced the institutional cynicism that comes with the "flavor-of-the-year" initiatives that surge at the beginning of every new school year and fizzle over time. We've also experienced the deflation that happens when the leaders championing new initiatives move on without structures in place to ensure continued success.

Spider Web Discussion does not aim to be a quick fix. It isn't about introducing a new, trendy structure in your classroom. It's not meant to be a box that is simply ticked on a supervisor's observation checklist.

Spider Web Discussion is a classroom philosophy, not a one-off activity. It's a culture. It's about understanding that learning is a complex process that plays out over time, through allowing students to grapple with challenging questions, ideas, and people. The process of Spider Web Discussion trains students to work together collaboratively in solving problems and to self-assess that process. The result is deep, high-level inquiry led and assessed by the students themselves, whether they are in 2nd grade social studies or high school geometry. Teachers using Spider Web Discussion aim to create authentic collaborators, communicators, and self-evaluators through ongoing, sustained discussion and assessment.

I have been using or training other teachers to use Spider Web Discussion in classrooms for more than 10 years and I believe it is the single most powerful tool in my teaching toolbox. When I read the four excerpts (p. 4), I'm struck by how well Spider Web Discussion achieves each of the valued skills and abilities cited. In my experience, it goes further than those crucial skills; if done right, it instills a magical feeling in the classroom, one where students feel safe and excited to share their deepest intellectual questions and ideas, where students realize they are on the same team, working toward a common goal, no longer competing for airtime or top grades. This awareness produces a sense of community and an ethical space in which true inquiry becomes possible.

Think of the aviation example: flight safety is better now due to the collaborative process. All who fly benefit from the fact that the industry now values collaboration over traditional power structures—and the stakes are pretty high when you are talking about plane safety. Systems thinking has evolved; today's employees must be prepared to value each other's input, seek varied voices, consider multiple perspectives, and "relinquish power," as noted by Bock, a Google executive. We should be giving these practices top billing in our classroom—not merely as structures, but as cultures and practices that are taught, learned, and assessed on a regular basis.

Why do we need Spider Webbers? Precisely for the reasons cited in the news excerpts. We owe it to our students to train them in—not just superficially expose them to—how to collaborate successfully. This is the vital skill for the future.

And while Spider Web Discussion teaches complex skills like teamwork, empathy, citing evidence, and self-assessment, the method is simple. You only need a rubric, a pencil, and some paper to get started.

A Brief History of Spider Web Discussion

The Origins of Harkness Method

In my mid-20s, I found myself teaching high school English at The Masters School, in New York's Hudson Valley. The Masters School was different from the other schools I had taught in; it was a Harkness school, which is a school that uses Socratic seminar discussion in its classrooms. I was daunted by the new-to-me notion that students were meant to run their own discussions.

The history of the Harkness method can be traced to one of America's preeminent New England prep schools, Philips Exeter Academy. In 1930, a wealthy donor named Edward Harkness gave the school a generous gift with the stipulation that it be used to promote a new style of classroom instruction. He wrote: "What I have in mind is [a classroom] where [students] could sit around a table with a teacher who would talk with them and instruct them by a sort of tutorial or conference method, where [each student] would feel encouraged to speak up. This would be a real revolution in methods" ("The Harkness Gift"). What developed from this idea were oval tables around which all students and the teacher were seated equally, able to see each other's eyes, fostering discussion.

At the Masters School, the oval table tradition lived on; every classroom, even science and math classrooms, had large oval tables in the center of the room, around which students debated, discussed, and problem solved (science rooms were purpose-built with labs in the back and oval tables in the front).

But the table is not the point; schools do not need a specific table to foster discussion. The purpose of the Harkness method is to actively engage students in their learning process through the exchange of ideas and group problem solving. For the first time in my career, I was asked to shift my role from fount of knowledge to facilitator. The challenge posed to me for the first time as an educator was entirely novel to me: how could I get the students themselves to uncover the most pertinent, key understandings in the content we studied with as little hand-holding from me as possible?

I began by using a rubric that a colleague shared with me, which flipped much of the conventional approach to class participation on its head. The rubric required students to engage in fairly standard practices during discussion, such as listening and being respectful, referring to the text to support their point, and avoiding interrupting others. One interesting element is that it asked for (more or less) equal participation during discussion, meaning the shy kids would need to make an effort to speak up and the chatty kids would need to make an effort to allow others some space to do so. The real kicker, though, was listed at the bottom of the rubric: "Because this is a team effort, there will be a team grade. The whole class will get the SAME grade."

This was truly different. In all the years I spent as a student and a teacher, the participation grade was always about 10 percent of the students' overall grade, and it was always an individual grade. A group grade, the thinking went, was unfair because it meant that someone else's behavior could bring your grade down (or up).

But I quickly realized the power of the group grade, which I'll talk about more explicitly in Chapter 6. At the beginning of the year, when I introduced the rubric and the group grade, there was an immediate understanding that they were in it together, working as a team. The grade did not seem unfair because they were not being graded on their individual understanding of the text, but their ability to work together. They were being assessed on how well they approached the text critically as a team, building on each other's ideas and pushing each other to new and better understandings. Once the goals of collaborative inquiry and teamwork were clear to the students, the assessment design seemed logical to them. However, I don't recommend counting the group grade in students' overall GPAs. I think the most powerful use of the group grade is through symbolic grades that are reported and shared with students and parents through the grade book or reporting systems—but not counted. That is, the group grade is most effective when it is used formatively and weighted 0 percent in overall GPA. See Chapter 6, which is devoted to the assessment strategy, for more information. I believe firmly that using a group grade is the secret to Spider Web Discussion's success. Why? Because we may ask students to work in groups monthly, weekly, or even daily, but unless we provide specific grading or feedback on that process, how do we know if they are learning to be effective collaborators?

I had never considered those questions until working at a Harkness school, but suddenly my mind was bursting with ideas and observations about the process. I began to let go of my instinct to control the class discussion. I listened more and spoke less. Eventually, I began to stay silent during the majority of Harkness discussion time.

I realized then that, for many years before, I had spoon-fed students with the key content, concepts, and questions. I may as well have written on the board every day in class, "Here Is What Is Important in the Text" and added my notes underneath.

Now, however, being in the environment where I was asked to take a step back and empower the students, I realized that students are adept at identifying what is important. It didn't take me long to see that they got much more out of the discussions when they were doing the heavy lifting. It was a humbling surprise and, ultimately, a pleasure to realize I wasn't as important to the process of learning as I believed I was.

From Harkness Method to Spider Web Discussion

In the years since working at The Masters School, I have honed this method into something more detailed and systematic with regard to process, assessment, and self-evaluation. To better reflect the purpose and differentiate it from Harkness discussion or Socratic seminar, I named this specific method of discussion Spider Web Discussion; think of it as Harkness 2.0.

In most high schools, Socratic seminar (or Harkness method) is still driven by the teacher. Although students are doing the discussing, the teacher is still the referee and master of knowledge, offering up the right question at the right moment, redirecting the conversation, correcting misunderstandings, ensuring that students are civil, and grading the participation.

In Spider Web Discussion, the teacher is largely silent. When Spider Web Discussion is taking place in my classroom, I sit in the back, away from the students, and avoid eye contact with them. I have a blank notepad on which I take notes about their discussion.

Who is asking the right question at the right moment, redirecting the conversation, correcting misunderstandings, and ensuring that students are being civil to one another? The students are. That's their job, and I train them over several months to do it. By the middle of the year, they do it very well. I take great pleasure in seeing how irrelevant I become in the classroom about three months into our Spider Web Discussion routine—the students themselves are far better referees and masters of knowledge than we usually give them credit for (or even allow them to be).

The name, Spider Web Discussion, is an acronym that describes all the components of the method:

• Synergetic—it's team oriented, balanced, and group graded (the whole class gets a single grade for each discussion).
• Practiced—it's ongoing, rehearsed, and debriefed. It's not a one-time activity but a process, much like writing.
• Independent—the teacher interferes as little as possible; students run the discussion and self-assess.
• Developed—the discussion gets deep, builds on itself, goes "somewhere."
• Exploration—this is the main goal; more than discussion, it is a discussion-based exploration (of a text, an Essential Question, or a topic)
• with a
• Rubric—this is the cornerstone to the whole process: to have a clear, concise rubric against which students can easily self-assess.

The "Web" part of the name comes from the web-like graph that a student or I draw to document the discussion in real time and then we use to debrief.

Spider Web Discussion captures the essence of what the technique aims to do: create graduates who are skilled collaborators, listeners, problem solvers, power relinquishers, and leaders.

What the Research Says

Interpersonal skills are more in demand, yet our education system has not quite caught up. We still largely design our classrooms and lessons—especially in high school and college—for acquisition of academic content instead of "soft" skills.

A 2015 study by an associate professor of education and economics at Harvard University highlights how, since 1980, jobs requiring social skills have grown more than other types of jobs. Especially booming are those occupations that require technical skills coupled with interpersonal skills, such as when doctors or computer scientists work on group projects. The job sectors with the greatest decline were those related to repetitive manual labor, like garbage collection, or individual analytical tasks, such as engineering. Jobs requiring social skills, regardless of the sector, grew 24 percent over the time period the study examined (Deming, 2015).

Our schools need more effective ways to teach social skills, so we can produce graduates truly prepared for their future careers. In 2009, Google began to examine the reasons why people left their company to work elsewhere, and found that one of the biggest factors was having a terrible boss. Google asked itself how it could crunch the numbers relating to who was a good boss and who was a bad boss at an unorthodox tech company. Project Oxygen was born, an initiative that used thousands of performance reviews, feedback surveys, and employee award nominations to distill data points to a list of eight key characteristics in the best managers at the company. Google called this list The Big Eight, and the traits are ranked in order of importance:

1. Be a good coach.
2. Empower your team and don't micromanage.
3. Express interest in team members' success and personal well-being.
4. Don't be a sissy*: be productive and results-oriented.
5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team.
6. Help your employees with career development.
7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.
8. Have key technical skills so you can h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword by Jay McTighe
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Why We Need Spider Webbers
• Chapter 2. The First Spider Web Discussion
• Chapter 3. The First Few Weeks of Discussion
• Chapter 4. Roadblocks Early On: Shy Kids and Superstars
• Chapter 5. Roadblocks Later On: That One Tough Class
• Chapter 6. Assessment Is a Tool, Not a Weapon
• Chapter 7. Benefits of Spider Web Discussion
• Chapter 8. Looking Ahead: A Year of Spider Web Discussion
• References
• Study Guide
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright