Reading Reflection 5 - "I'm thinking . . ."

Since we have free reign on how to present this week's response, I would like to write my thoughts as I read through Chapter 8, "Treating Expectations for Competence." If my thoughts seem disconnected, realize that I am writing them chronologically as they come to my mind when reading.

(p 117) The problem:
High status students are expected to do well on group assignments and may dominate the group while low status students are expected to do poorly on group assignments and may not participate.

(117) Two strategies:
1) "establishing cooperative norms such as 'everyone participates' and 'everyone helps'"
2) "giving every student a part or role to play"

(118) Design tasks where the low status students can be the experts and teach the high status students.
Question: How do you find a task that applies to the entire class in which the low status students are the experts? Perhaps just apply this principle one student at a time? (Not every task will be able to bring in all the low status students, but hopefully some of them?)
Task idea: In a task such as "Master Designer" (p. 168) choose the low status students to be the master designers in their groups. This makes them the one who knows all the answers and the rest of the group is asking them questions about how the final design of the shapes are supposed to look.

(120-122) Expectation training - this sounds like a good idea, training the low-status students so that they can be the "experts" in a group activity, but I am unsure how this is practically applied. What kind of situations would you be training these students for? As Cohen notes himself, this model is also a difficult one since it requires extra time put in for the teacher.

(122) Providing tasks that use multiple abilities increases the probability that each person will have a different skill to contribute. When introducing the task to the students, I think it is very valuable to stress to the students "None of us has all of these abilities. Each one of us has some of these abilities" (122). This gets the students thinking about what each person has to contribute and, like Maria shared on p. 122, the students might be surprised about what ability someone might bring to the group.

(128) We need to focus on intellectual abilities - working with others or working with one's hands are not seen at the same status of working with the intellect in our culture. When speaking of one's artistic abilities, one can focus on the intellectual ability to visualize something in a new way and represent it symbolically.

(128) I agree that it is important to remind students that they can develop new abilities and they are not simply abilities that people are born with. If this is not made clear, some students may hear the list of abilities you give for specific tasks and not find themselves capable of any of them. This could push them toward further non participation. Thus, we need to provide tasks that incorporate a wide variety of abilities, but emphasize the possibility of developing these abilities as well.

(131-133) We need to be looking for the specific ways that our low status students are succeeding and praise them for their successes. This is an excellent way to give confidence to low status students - and if we really believe that each student is valuable, then that means that each student has something unique about them that is worth getting to know. We need to be searching for that unique thing and make it known.