Inquiry Circles

I wanted to encourage the students to put into practice some of the things I have been endeavouring to teach them this quarter - reading strategies, literature analysis by facilitating their research and insight into The Great Gatsby rather than simply feeding them the information - which would probably be both boring and less memorable.  It is important they understand the novel as well as they can as they will be examined on it in their IGCSE exam in May.  So, if I am honest, I felt some ambivalence about releasing control to the class, as I want them to do well in the exam and sometimes I think, as teachers, we feel that can only be achieved by drip feeding them "what we know best".  However, I know at gut level that they will remember more and be more engaged in the process by doing it themselves.
So, I started the process by giving them a 4 page list of questions and essay titles on The Great Gatsby that I gleaned from the internet.  I chose a group of students to work with as a guided group and the others were free to choose their own group to work in.  Then we spent a few minutes reading through the sheets and picking out common themes or ideas that recurred. As a whole class we then shared these and ended up with a list of themes for the novel.
I asked the students to choose one of the themes to work with and from groups around that theme.  At first almost everyone wanted to be in the symbolism group and I wasn't sure how to encourage students to consider other choices without taking control back and assigning groups.  However, thankfully I paused and students began to take initiative and gravitate to other groups.  One group even created a new theme that we had missed.
Our librarian had collected a pile of resources from the library: DVDs, books, encyclopedias and I added a lot of critiques of the novel that the previous teacher had amassed.  I also pointed them to EBSCOHost to look for articles.  I gave them free reign to find sources on the internet.
And so it begins.

Wiki

This is something completely new to me.  In fact, I hadn't really heard of wikis or their potential in the classroom until this quarter!  But I love the philosophical framework of the Wiki.  This is how I view it: It encourages collaboration, it ensures the students do the work (rather than me), they have a real purpose (use the site for revision next semester before the exam and make it available to the wider web audience when complete) and it uses some of the skills that the students use outside of the typical classroom.
I had a Middle School colleague observing me this morning and he was fascinated by the setup of the Wiki. Then once I felt confident the students knew what they were doing with the wiki, I moved into book study evaluations.  I took each book group aside and asked questions about how they had managed the group (one group used skype, one group facebook, the others face to face discussion) and then took part with the group in a discussion of the novel as a whole.  It was fascinating - and thrilling - to see how deeply the students had engaged with the novel and each other in the process.  Some of them had greater insight and engagement with the novel or characters than I did.  Only one group did not really gain from the group discussions.  That made me sad, having seen how the others had, and I encouraged them to be willing to try again in the future with different people.  My colleague also sat in on the discussion/evaluation and enjoyed that too.  he had only planned to stay for part of the lesson but ended up being there almost the whole time!