Why I Prefer Fishbowls Over Whole-Class Seminars
And how the TQE Method has played a major role in making them better
There’s a very specific look of a student anxious about jumping into the class conversation during a seminar discussion.
You can see them begin to open their mouth, and then close the moment another student jumps in before them—frazzled but also relieved, in a way. They scan their notes multiple times over, similar to a golfer taking extra practice swings before the shot they really don’t feel comfortable making. And then after a few failed attempts at speaking, the attempts themselves dwindle and passivity can take over, the white flag waved as they opt to listen the rest of the way rather than speak, leaving the room frustrated and with so much they wish they could have said.
As a teacher who has watched many students go through this sequence too often, I’ve adjusted what “seminars” look like this year, opting for a “fishbowl” format instead that I enthusiastically recommend others to consider.
Here’s why and here’s how:
First: what do I mean by “seminar” in our classroom?
I’ll be the first to admit that “seminar” is a bit buzzword-y in that a lot of teachers use it in a lot of ways, from the classical socratic seminar to, well, any time students have their desks in a circle and are having some sort of conversation in a classroom.
And the thing about buzzwords is that people tend to project their way of using it onto others, so I wanted to be 100% clear about what I mean by “seminar” here:
The conversation will be student-driven, not teacher-driven; ideally, there will be as little teacher facilitation as possible
Students are expected to prepare in advance, including generating their own ideas/questions for the conversation
Participation throughout the seminar is primarily “open” and unstructured, with students jumping in without hand-raising, etc.
The conversation itself is the skill and assessment—rather than just being a vehicle for assessing other skills/knowledge.
I’ll also lay out my cards in admitting that I am a big fan of “seminar” formats in the classroom, as I think far too often we create a structure in our classrooms that is not adequate for preparing students for success beyond our classroom.
Seminars, though? That is real-life in every single way: having to initiate and respond to conversation with colleagues in real-time after doing your own preparation of the materials in advance is about as transferable of a skill as you’ll find in education—and therefore creating these spaces is one of the most valuable thing we can do in our classroom communities, in my opinion.
But whole-class seminars have some issues, though:
I remember the first time in a summer training that they walked us through how to design and facilitate a seminar discussion in our classrooms and being transfixed immediately: I could not wait to bring this into my classroom community.
But then September arrived that year and I started trying to arrange the thirty desks into a full circle, and a quite-obvious issue arrived: there was not enough space.
This physical limitation, however, was quite artificial compared to the deeper limitations I realized were occurring when you had the entire class in a single circle:
a whole-class circle means desks are pretty far apart, with students essentially talking across the room at one another
from an assessment standpoint, students were having to get X-amount of contributions into the conversation—and tracking the participation of an entire class at once meant relatively surface-level feedback from me as an instructor
this added to the stress of students, too, who were spending far more time trying to get their X-amount of contributions instead of authentically listening and responding to their peers
and then the biggest issue of them all: asking students to “jump in” to the conversation on their own, without raising their hand, is a big ask in that full circle scenario—and shuts a lot of students down.
Despite all these things, seminars in our classroom community still had incredible moments—and a good amount of students thrived! I would always walk out of them as a teacher with a handful of honestly-inspirational anecdotes, and if I wanted I could frame the entire experience as “peak learning.”
But that would mean leaving out the many students who were not served well by the format—and that’s why I decided to try an alternative: “the fishbowl.”
The set-up: a small circle of desks in the center
This is another oft-used format, and one I’ll be honest that did not go well when I tried it earlier in my career—albeit without a seminar design.
The concept is simple: arrange a small circle in the center of the room with 1/3 of its desks (in my room of 36 desks currently, that means 12 desks in the center) with the others forming a larger circle on the perimeter around it. This is where the “fish bowl” name comes from, I’m sure—though another fish-obsessed teacher in our hallway has informed me that tanks are in fact preferable to bowls for the health of fish, but we’ll stick with the metaphor…
Anyways, seminar occurs in the smaller circle, therefore, with students rotating into the center through the period while primarily observing/taking notes when in the outer circle. In our ninety-minute period, this means three twenty-minute “fishbowl seminars,” after factoring in our opening reflection, transitions, and debriefing at the end.
(Note: the norming at the beginning is also essential for any seminar discussion, I’d add, along with creating space for authentic debriefing in your design!)
In the rest of this post, however, I want to recount four things I adjusted or added this past week that made the experience especially good, I think, and what I plan to double-down on in future fishbowl experiences.
Adjustment #1: TQE Annotations for Prep
I’ve gone on and on this year about how the Marisa Thompson’s TQE method has transformed inquiry-thinking in my classroom, and this is no exception as it naturally created a pathway towards meaningful seminar prep.
Sticking with our Octopus theme throughout the year with TQE, students were asked to prepare with eight TQE annotations on their assigned excerpt for the fishbowl seminar. Since we were at the end of our novel (Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston), each of the fishbowls had one of the final chapters with a key excerpt from it—and this meant students could focus their preparation around annotation in a tangible way that built on a system we had already developed in the classroom.
The result? Not only were the texts beautifully marked up (see image above), but the quality of preparation was much better than in previous, more-open-ended seminars.
This also led into my second adjustment, too…
Adjustment #2: TQE Whiparound to Begin
Even in these smaller circles, another thing that can be really challenging for students is the “jumping in” aspect of seminar discussions, so to build confidence we begin each fishbowl with a “whiparound” as each student chooses one TQE annotation to share and explain.
Students go clockwise around, too, so there is no anxiety about when to jump in, and as students are given this prompt at the beginning they have a clear understanding of what to prep for in this opening stage.
Finally, the opening of 10-ish TQE annotations from the excerpt creates a great transition into broader conversation around the excerpt, as students can respond to each other’s questions, make connections between thoughts, etc.—all while building confidence by giving everyone a chance to “dip their toe in the water,” so to speak.
But what about those folks on the outside?
Adjustment #3: TQE Observations for the Outer Circle
One common issue that I’ve had in the past with the fishbowl format is what takes place with students on the outside, as of course you are primarily asking students to focus on listening while you yourself as a teacher are naturally going to be centering your own focus on monitoring the conversation going on in the center rather than students on the perimeter.
This takes a lot of trust, yes, but it also comes down to the systems you establish—and one shift I made this time around was to have them use those same TQE skills as observers to the conversation—jotting down thoughts, questions, and epiphanies they had while listening to their peers in the center.
If you look at the image above, this yielded much stronger engagement from the perimeter—not just in terms of how they showed up for their peers, but also the type of learning they took away that was important to them since their next step was developing and writing a literary analysis of the novel.
(And again, this is why I’m such a fan and advocate of the TQE method after my own experience with it: it is flexible and immersive in the best of ways, creating the type of system that can be a through-line for so much of the learning in a classroom community!)
However, there was one more thing that I believe made the outside experience better…
Adjustment #4: “Intermissions” for Outside Debriefs
After our first day of fishbowls, I noticed that no matter how enriching the conversation at the center was, it was a big ask of students on the outside to stay focused for the twenty-ish minute conversation taking place at the center—especially later in the class period.
So I made a quick adjustment going into our second day and designed an “intermission” in which students on the outside debriefed with their elbow partner about one TQE they had written down while those in the center had a chance to prepare for the second half of their own mini-seminar.
This was a natural intermission, too, since the design was already set-up to begin with analysis of the excerpt and then broaden to the full chapter and their overall interpretations of the novel. This time around, I simply created a one-minute pause for the outside circle to debrief—and then we dove back in!
Not only did this heighten the energy/investment for those latter-half conversations in each seminar, but it also gave those in the center a chance to pause/collect themselves and for me to frame what I had heard and push their thinking, which I believe helped make for better conversations overall, too.
So, why fishbowls over whole-class seminars, again?
It’s not just about fitting all those desks into the room. (Though, I’ll add that it is much easier to fit the desks in a room via fishbowl than whole-class seminar!)
Rather, let’s just return to the four issues I named at the beginning regarding whole-class seminar conversations:
Lack of physical proximity
Surface-level teacher feedback
Quantity-over-quality participation
“Jumping in” stress for students
Well, the desks being closer together in the center of the room with fishbowls solves the proximity issue—and also better approximates the real-life “conference table” situation that students will likely need at some point or another.
And by having a narrower scope for where each conversation is taking place, it allows me to not only create better feedback for students but also to respond more meaningfully real time, whether to offer a clarification or push the conversation towards an opportunistic direction.
Students also have much more confidence that they are going to get the “requisite” number of contributions, too, so they have more patience even within the circle—and as a result they do a much better job listening to each other for genuine conversation and exploration rather than just “popcorning” prepared observations to meet the checklist criteria.
Oh, and that student who was afraid to jump in?
This doesn’t solve it for every student, but it does for most.
Almost all of the same students who opted out of the whole-class conversations earlier this year were jumping in not once but again and again, in period after period, and looking at my own feedback this November compared to our first round two months prior the growth was considerable—most especially for those quieter students who are often intimidated by this type of learning format.
One of them even made eye contact with me while leaving the room this past week, a student who had thrived in the conversation after not saying a word two months prior.
They just gave me a thumbs up, a smile, and then darted out of the room.
I wanted to congratulate them, but then realized that they didn’t have anything else to say because they had already said what they needed to.
And that is why I’m sticking with fishbowls from now on.
Love this!!