My colleague Beth Benzinger, has organized two student forums. These forums tackle difficult issues that are important to students but do not happen to come up inside the classroom. The format reminds me of Oprah, in that you have four student panelist who each talk about five minutes on the topic. When they are done talking they then open up the microphone for questions from the audience. After about fifteen minutes of questions and answers we then breakout into classrooms for more discussions.
What is great about these forums besides Beth's upfront organization, (which is tremendous), the forum is really run by the students. They are the expert panelist, they ask the questions and then finally we have students leading the discussions in the classroom breakout sessions.
What has impressed me so far is the maturity of the questions and the discussion on these controversial topics. In our breakout groups we literally have to ask students to leave at 4:00. They are putting in 90 minutes of extra time for no grade, to discuss issues that are important to them.
It demonstrates that they have a spark within them we as teachers need to know how to start it and keep the flame on fire. In a school of 1800 students we had 330 attend our forum on race and 135 attend our forum on gender.
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