Applying the Fishbowl Technique to Weather Discussions

Students' critical thinking skills can be honed through experience in scientific argumentation (Driver et al. 2000). For Meteorology students in particular, the weather discussion is a venue in which scientific argumentation is carried out. However, simply asking students to discuss the weather in a class is not sufficient to instill a culture and understanding of scientific argumentation. Luckily, structures exist that in other contexts have been shown to support student learning, both of scientific argumentation in general and the subject matter in particular. One such structure is known as the Fishbowl Technique (Pinto 2012) or Science Seminar (Gonzalez-Howard and McNeill 2019), which I have experimentally applied to weather discussions in a sophomore-level meteorological analysis course. In my variation of the structure, for each discussion the class is divided into three groups, the Leaders (who lead the discussion), the Inquirers (who ask questions of or make comments to the Leaders that are primarily driven by the Universal Intellectual Standards [Paul and Elder 2015]), and the Evaluators (peer reviewers who assign scores to the other groups based on rubrics). Here, I will give my informal perspective on the challenges and possible successes of this approach as well as additional logistical details. Full validation of the technique's effectiveness awaits further research.