Café Culture Discussion Strategy: Explanation
This activity takes its inspiration from café-style culture.
The room is set-up in a series of pods.
These are made up of one or two tables with four or five chairs around them.
Each pod is equipped with a sheet of A3 paper and a pen.
The number of pods you need is determined by the number of learners in your class.
Ideally, you will want no more than four or five learners at each pod, at any one time.
Ask learners to distribute themselves around the room, sitting at the pods.
Explain what topic you are studying and why.
In advance of this, you will need to have prepared the same number of slips of paper as there are pods. Each slip should have a question written on it, related to the topic of study.
Hand out the slips of paper, one per pod.
The learner who receives the paper is in charge of their pod.
They write the question or statement at the top of their piece of paper.
Learners are then invited to discuss the questions in their pods, with the person who is in charge making notes on the sheet of paper.
After three or four minutes, announce that all learners except those who have been placed in charge should stand up and move to another pod.
Once learners are in their new groupings, the person in charge explains what the question is and what has previously been discussed.
They use the notes made on the sheet of paper to aid their explanation.
The groups then pick up the discussion from where it was left off and take it in whatever direction they wish.
You can repeat the process as many times as you feel is appropriate.
Café Culture Discussion Strategy: Example
Topic: World War Two
The class have already studied the build-up to World War Two.
The teacher explains that they are to continue studying this but that the lesson will focus on the application of existing knowledge along with analysis and assessment of different interpretations.
There are twenty-four learners, so the teacher arranges the room into six pods.
They give out six slips of paper containing the following questions:
- Was the Treaty of Versailles the direct cause of World War Two?
- How important was Hitler’s personality in causing the war?
- Is it true to say that there was no way war could have been averted?
- If there had not been a Great Depression in the 1930s, would World War Two have happened?
- Why did the war not start sooner?
- How might nationalist ideology be said to have caused the war?
Learners move between pods, discussing several questions.
In so doing, they think carefully about their existing knowledge of the topic while also refining their understanding.
The thinking they are being asked to do is at a high level. It involves evaluation, analysis, and synthesis.
In this example, the activity would serve as an excellent partner to an essay-writing task.
If the teacher did go down this route, they could stick up the sheets of paper at the front of the room for learners to refer to as they go about writing their essays.
Café Culture Discussion Strategy: Extensions and Developments
- At the end of the activity ask the learners who are in charge of each pod to share their final thoughts regarding their question with the whole class. This is an opportunity for those learners to summarise the discussions they have heard and to give their own viewpoint on how to best answer the question.
- Try displaying an image of street cafes on your whiteboard and playing some incidental music. This adds to the mood and is a nice way to get learners into the mindset of imagining they are at a café, discussing questions with their peers.
