BIS 371

Twentieth-Century American Literature:

Drama

Spring 2007

David S. Goldstein, Ph.D.

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Group Discussion Leadership Assignment

due as assigned in class

The purpose of this exercise is to help you collaborate with classmates to help yourselves and your classmates learn more about the plays we are reading.

You will assign roles in collaboration with your group.  Some of you will do parts of the presentation, some of you will help write discussion questions, and all of you will meet with the other discussion groups to assist.  You may do more than one of these assigned roles.

The play assignments are as follows:

Group Number: Play: Discussion Questions and scholarly article due at 1:05 p.m. on: Presentation date: Roles Document due at 1:05 p.m. on:
1 Death of a Salesman  by Arthur Miller Thurs., April 12 Thurs., April 19 Thurs., April 26
2 A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams Tues., April 24 Tues., May 1 Tues., May 8
3 A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry Tues., May 1 Tues., May 8 Tues., May 15
4 Fences by August Wilson Tues., May 8 Tues., May 15 Tues., May 22 
5 M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang Thurs., May 10 Thurs., May 17 Thurs., May 24
6 Angels in America, Part 1: The Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner Thurs. May 17 Thurs. May 24 Thurs., May 31

 

Discussion Questions :

 
In collaboration with your groupmates, write five good, substantive discussion questions.  Remember that a good discussion question comes from genuine curiosity on your part, and stimulates good dialogue among group members.  Good discussion questions rarely can be answered with a "yes" or "no."  You may use one discussion question that you find from another source, but if you do, make sure you provide proper attribution.  You must always give others credit for their intellectual property, and that includes discussion questions.

You will submit your group's questions to me as a Microsoft Word document in Blackboard (click on "Group Pages," and then on "Discussion Board," and then on "Group Discussion Leadership Questions") no later than 1:05 p.m., seven calendar days before your group is scheduled to lead the discussion.  Please have every group member's name on the document, even the ones who did not help write the discussion questions.  Although some group members might not be assigned to help write the questions, every group member is responsible for their content, so I strongly encourage all group members to check and approve the questions before they are submitted to me.  The questions should be carefully proofread.  Do not assign the questions to particular groups.  I will do that.

Article:

Your group must find and read a scholarly article related to the play that you are helping to teach.  See http://www.uwb.edu/library/guides/bis371/index.html for Research Librarian Leslie Bussert's guide to conducting research for this assignment.  (Remember to click on the "Off-Campus Access" link at the top of the UW LIbraries databases page if you want to use one of the academic databases from off-campus.)  The chosen article, which will be shared by your whole group (i.e., everyone in your group will read the same article that you collectively choose), must be submitted to me for approval by the same deadline as the discussion questions, as described in the table above, but I recommend submitting it earlier in case you need to find an alternative.  The article must be from a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal .  (If you are unsure how to identify a scholarly article, read the Campus Library's guide at < http://www.bothell.washington.edu/library/guides/sources.html>.)

From the class research guide prepared by our research librarian, Leslie Bussert:

Is Your Article Peer Reviewed/Scholarly?

Check to see whether the article is presenting original research. Some articles in peer-reviewed journals are not actually research articles. Journals sometimes include other kinds of articles in addition to research articles. A journal called The Explicator, for example, publishes nothing but brief points about literary works, although it is a peer-reviewed journal.

More...

Presentation:
On your group's assigned day, you will make your presentation to the class.  (Remember that your classmates, not I, are your audience.)  I strongly recommend practicing your presentation.  The Writing Center (download this flyer for more information) and the Campus Media Center have resources to help practice your presentation.  Remember that you need to project your voice so that everyone in class can hear you, even in the back of the room.  Frequent eye contact and a well-modulated voice helps maintain your audience's attention.  If you want to use any of the classroom technology, please let me know at least twenty-four hours in advance.

Your presentation should have these elements:

Discussion Leadership:

After your group's presentation, the members of your group will split up and join the other four discussion groups to help lead their discussions.  Your job will be to keep the conversation going, and to provide insights that the host group might not have had on their own, since you are now experts on the play, but also make sure you let the host group do most of the talking.

Then, after the break, the class will reconvene and your group will facilitate the full-class discussion afterward, when all the groups report on their responses to the questions you wrote. In the past, groups have successfully handled this part of the assignment by having one person lead the discussion (calling on each group's reporter to give his or her group's response to their discussion question) while another group member writes notes about the responses on the board.

Roles Document :
No later than 1:05 p.m. one week after your group's presentation (see table above), you will submit, in the "Group Pages" of Blackboard, a single Word document that describes, in about one paragraph per group member, what each group member did for the group presentation.  The list should be specific, such as, "Mary Husky wrote one discussion question, helped approve the selected scholarly article, and helped lead one of the small group discussions."  I recommend that your group choose one person to assemble the document, and choose a deadline by which all group members will post their own contribution descriptions in the "Group Pages" area of Blackboard so the "assembler" has time to complete the document by the deadline.  Please use only Blackboard rather than personal e-mail so that everyone in your group has access to the same information.  If I do not see a personal posting from a group member, I will assume that the individual neglected to submit one.

In other words, your group will assign one person to be the assembler, and set a deadline by which everyone in the group will post his or her role in the "Group Pages" area of Blackboard.  The assembler will then put everyone's contribution onto a single Word document and submit it as an attachment in Blackboard by the deadline shown above in the table.


I will e-mail the members of your group within one week to provide feedback and grades. Except for unusual circumstances, everyone in your group will get the same grade, so you have a strong incentive to help each other.

Criteria for grading:

Your presentation will be graded on the overall contribution to learning provided by all of the elements of the presentation.  I consider each element to be of equivalent importance.  The best way to earn a high grade is to help each other.

The group presentation assignment is worth 30 percent of the final course grade.

If you have problems with any of your group members, please let me know as soon as possible.

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This page last updated April 13, 2007.

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