The transcripts were an interesting text for this class. It is difficult to read through a transcript and understand what is going on, so I really thought it was useful for us to perform them. It also made for an entertaining few days of class. Every performance seemed to include good discussion and was useful for us to experience, as there were so many different examples of what discussion can look like in the classroom.
I especially liked the one that Kelsey did in Belgrade. I liked the way the teacher was interacting with the students. He was playing a sort of game with them where he would never really answer their questions, but would instead keep asking them questions so they would come to the answer themselves. This rhetorical strategy would be difficult to implement successfully, but I think he was able to do so because he had an excellent rapport with his students.
Another transcript I enjoyed was the one that Alyssa and I acted out, the one with Greg. I enjoyed playing that part because it was so funny. We discussed whether or not Greg's story was relevant to the discussion, and it really wasn't in an explicit sense. He did, however, loosen the class up for later discussion, as Doug and Emma informed us. I think it is useful to have a student like Greg in every classroom. He may have gone on a tangent irrelevant to the discussion, but he improved the dynamic in the classroom, creating a space more conducive to discussion.
The main goal of my future classroom discussion will be to have fun with it. That does not exclude arguing, because, at least for me, getting excited enough about a topic to have a lively argument is a lot of fun. I would like to develop a rapport with my students similar to the teacher in the first example I cited, and I would like to let students like Greg tell their stories (within reason) to get the class in the right mood for lively discussion. One thing I will always make sure to do is answer every comment with a summary of that comment and feedback. I think teachers sometimes didn't do that in the transcripts. For example, in the one I recorded, I noticed that the teacher sometimes would listen to a students comment but never expound on it and would move on to something else. She is a student teacher so I guess she has some leeway in the discussion department but I really think she did a good job considering her lack of experience.
I like how you reflected on the assignment of the transcripts and transferred the assignment to how you will use it in your future class. This seemed to be part of the nature of the project even though it was not explicitly discussed in class. This assignment has definitely made me evaluate how I participate in class discussions.
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