Showcase Discussion Strategy: Explanation
This activity recreates an art gallery or museum set-up in the classroom.
The teacher asks learners to complete an extended piece of work.
Examples include:
- A design task
- The creation of a report
- The creation of a poster presentation
- The writing of an essay
- A problem-solving activity in which the solution is explained through writing or images
The work can be done individually or in groups.
Once the task is completed, everything is cleared from learner’s desks and the work they created is placed in the middle of the empty space.
Learners then get into pairs.
Each pair is given a handout containing the following questions:
- What do you like about the work?
- How does the work go about answering the question/completing the task?
- What are three strengths you notice?
- What is one way you think the piece of work could be improved?
Underneath each question there should be space in which learners can write their answers.
You should repeat this three times on the sheet, so learners can capture their thinking about three different pieces of work.
The teacher asks pairs to walk around the room and to look at all the different pieces of work that are on display.
Pupils are invited to discuss what they see with their partner.
Having viewed the entire showcase, each pair must identify three pieces of work they want to analyse further.
They return to each of these in turn and discuss them in more detail, using the questions on their sheets.
They should capture their thoughts underneath each question.
When sufficient time has passed, the teacher asks learners to return to their seats.
A whole-class discussion ensues in which different pairs are invited to share their thoughts about the work they have seen.
Showcase Discussion Strategy: Example
Topic: Human Digestion
The teacher sets the following task:
- In groups of three or four, produce a newspaper front cover on a sheet of A3 paper with the following headline: Scientists Discover Secrets of Human Digestive System!
Learners will need a reasonable amount of time for this activity.
Depending on the level of depth the teacher wants from them, it could encompass an entire lesson.
When groups have finished (or at the start of the next lesson), they clear their desks and put their work on display, making it part of the ‘showcase’.
Next, learners get into pairs and move around the room, looking at what other groups have done, discussing this, and capturing their thoughts on their handouts, as per above.
The beauty of this task is that, because learners have spent a good amount of time creating their own work, they have already spent time thinking carefully about how the question might be answered or how the task might be completed.
This means they can look at the work produced by the rest of the class with an analytical eye.
The discussions that result are thus likely to be of a high standard.
In our example here, learners have spent a long time thinking about the human digestive system and how to synthesise their knowledge of it to create a compelling newspaper front page.
This means they are primed to offer detailed assessments of their peers’ work when the activity begins.
Showcase Discussion Strategy: Extensions and Developments
- When learners have completed the task, ask them to write a reflection on their own work. This should include them comparing what they have produced with the other work they have seen.
- At the end of the task, ask learners to find the author of one of the pieces of work they peer-assessed. They should talk to the author about their work and compare the peer-assessment with the author’s own thoughts. If work has been created by groups, like in our biology example above, this might involve two groups getting together and discussing what they liked about each other’s work and what each other could do to improve it.
