Analyzing Text and Stimulating Discussion with World Cafe
in Fifth Grade, Ashley Carrico
World Café is a teaching technique that helps students think deeply about issues by asking them to find evidence of various trends and concepts in what they are reading. The process engages students in scholarly discussions and teaches them how to consider divergent ideas and to approach any text or topic analytically.
Nanci Cole, master teacher from the California Association for the Gifted, introduced World Café to Explorer after she creatively adapted it from a business training protocol. At Explorer, we have made some changes to resonate with our school. World Café is essentially a method for organizing student discussion and analysis of texts. The basic idea is that students meet in small groups at separate tables. Each table has a host, who offers snacks and facilitates discussion. The children rotate through the tables. They are discussing the same text or issue, but at each table they are looking at it through a different lens – focusing on ethics, origins, patterns, multiple perspectives, parallels – any of the icons of depth and complexity that are useful for the topic at hand.
Here is an example of how it works: I gave the children an article to read called "Iraq: Caught in the Crossfire". We often have a World Café on a Friday, so they have a week to prepare for it. Each night, they read the article over again, focusing on a different concept (icon). For this article, I chose, language, details, and ethics, and then I let them choose their own icon to focus on for the fourth night.
For a simpler article, I might have chosen more complex icons to focus on, but I wanted to be sure about comprehension in this particular article. That is one of the nice things about working with these icons, because they naturally allow you to differentiate instruction – icons such as language and details are much more about comprehension, while others such as patterns, paradox or parallel require more analysis. Some of the children will have much more to contribute in language and details, which are the lower Bloom’s taxonomy skills. They may have less to contribute at the table that is discussing parallels or the open discussion of any icon. But through listening at those more complex tables, they learn and eventually become more adept at that kind of analysis.
I give them a graphic organizer with four sections (one for each icon) in which they can take notes each night. For example, here are some of the notes that children took on this article. I actually started doing the note-taking graphic organizer for myself, as a way to assess comprehension, because during the actual World Café, I can’t be at every table, but the children said it really helped them to have a better discussion, so now we use it every time.
language: “abaya, Kurd, militia”
ethics: “is it ethical for kids to miss school because the war is going on?”
“is it ethical for them to be in such a horrible situation and not move the children away?”
rules: “Muslim women must wear an abaya.”
On the day of the World Café, hosts are chosen for each table (we make sure everyone in the class has a chance to host). The host welcomes everyone to the table, offers food and reminds them of the World Café etiquette:
Remember to focus on what matters.
Remember to contribute your thinking.
Remember to speak your mind.
Take risks.
We give the first two groups about five minutes at each table and then the last two groups only two minutes. If the discussion gets repetitive after several groups have passed through (which it sometimes does for language or details), I ask them to see if they can find patterns in the words or details that have already been identified by groups before them.
The children are engaged and participate fully. Once they have done it the first time, they know what all the preparation is leading up to, and they can anticipate it while they are reading the material. It is a way for them to deeply understand an article or an issue, or a chapter in a book that they otherwise would read much more superficially. After World Café, we meet and reflect about the process; we compliment good work, give appreciations, comment on what went well and what didn’t work well today. But we can also have very mature discussions of the topic at hand – the kind of discussion we would not have been able to have without the in-depth reading and analysis that World Café stimulates.
Note: materials for working with the icons of depth and complexity are available at jtayloreducation.com.
