Planning Considerations:
I chose to use the Circle of Viewpoints from Harvard’s Project Zero in a couple of different ways in my classroom. My goal with using this protocol was for students to consider events or issues from multiple points of view. I like this protocol for its versatility: it can apply to a lot of different subject areas and texts. Personally, I am in a district with a pretty regimented ELA curriculum, but it worked perfectly within that to help teach point of view.
When planning to use this protocol, teachers may want to model getting into another character/person’s perspective to demonstrate how to respectfully do that, using evidence from a book or research. That could easily take 20 minutes to go through that process. Students should then have time to delve into the perspective they are using before being asked to discuss; for me, that meant giving them some discussion/research questions to prepare answers to. The preparation time could take another 20-30 minutes. It might be helpful for students working from the same perspective to meet and discuss their ideas before having a mixed-group discussion, too.
Teachers can determine which perspectives to use for this activity in advance, or they can have students generate/identify them. With middle schoolers, I chose to determine them in advance and assign students a perspective (randomly) before class to ensure there was a good mix of every perspective represented in each small group.
We had worked on/practiced discussion norms multiple times as a class before this, so students knew the expectations and had practiced speaking in groups, being respectful, etc. This led to respectful, engaging conversations pretty much across the board, so I would plan to use this protocol when you’ve worked on some basic discussion norms with students.
Suggested Resources/Materials:
I had graphic organizers set up in advance for students to “get into the perspective” before discussing:
Non-Fiction: Social Media Worldwide
Some of the eventual discussion questions came from the graphic organizers. Others were not ones they had prepared for specifically, so they had to practice thinking on the spot and applying what they knew of their assigned perspective to a new question.
Fiction Discussion Questions (including debrief)
Non-Fiction Discussion Questions (including debrief)
Standards alignment:
Based on Wisconsin State ELA Standards:
Fiction: W7.9, SL7.1, SL7.4, R7.1
Non-fiction: W7.7, W7.8, W7.9, SL7.1, SL7.4, R7.1
Student examples:
Non-fiction examples of student work:
Recommendations:
Some students will need help to really understand their assigned perspective. Before doing this protocol as an assignment, it might help for teachers to do some practice perspective-taking activities. For example, considering a part of a story from another character’s point of view. Or brainstorming questions that students might want to ask a character or a person who lives in another location. This helps students practice understanding others’ points of view. It is important to have laid the groundwork with solid expectations of respect for others before embarking on this activity.
Reflection:
One thing I realized through this work is that perspective-taking is important, but does still depend on a person’s ability to have empathy and might also be influenced by students’ own biases. Middle school students can struggle with this, especially to do this without judgement or falling back on stereotypes or being goofy.
That said, for middle schoolers, this worked really well because they are very reluctant to share their own ideas in class because they don’t want to be wrong or off base. Through this activity, they are sharing someone else’s ideas (their assigned perspective’s) so it takes some of the pressure off of them-they aren’t sharing “their” ideas, they are sharing the ideas of an assigned perspective!
I explained the purpose of doing this was for them to practice looking at issues from multiple points of view, even in real life. In mini-debriefs, we talked about when it might be helpful to pause and try to understand another person’s perspective on an issue or event. In the debrief we pushed out thinking beyond the context of the activity. For instance, with the fiction activity, we discussed how places, like Greenville, can be important to people and a part of who they are. Students reflected and shared on places important to them.