Guifobert’s suggestion conveyed a lot. He is a fifth-grader at the Matènwa Community Learning Center (www.matenwa.org), and he and his class were working with me to make a map of the property his school sits on. It was our second day of work.

We had measured the back border of the property to be 98 students long by lining one after another, spreading our arms out as wide as we could. We decided to ignore the differences in size that are predictable in a fifth grade class, no to mention the way Enel and I skewed the numbers. We had already traced the front wall on the blackboard using a scale of three centimeters to one student. We had fixed the angles at the corners of the property by using a pair of pencils, opening them as though they were a compass and copying the angle they formed. We had then traced one side of the property and were prepared to trace the back.

That’s when we ran out of space. We needed enough space to trace a line 294 centimeters long, but ran into the edge of the blackboard just before we reached 200. I asked the class what we should do, and Guifobert suggested that we bend the line inward so that it would fit on the board.

Enel, who is the school’s fifth-grade teacher, and I had been planning the class for about a month. He and I had spoken about how struck he had been when he visited the States by the use Americans make of maps. He was surprised to see how Americans he knows can find their ways around unfamiliar areas by looking at maps and reading signs. I had talked about the vague memories I still have of the importance that was given to map reading when I was in elementary school. We had started discussing whether there was something we could do with his students that would help them learn to use maps as I do.

This is what we came up with: We would spend a class sitting outside in the schoolyard, scratching a map of the school into the ground with a stick. We would trace it as we sat on benches in a circle around it. Everyone would have a chance to take the stick, erase previous work, and trace out new suggestions. Enel and I would push the students to argue through their disagreements so that the class would reach rough consensus on every point: the size and position of each school building, and of everything important in the schoolyard, as well as the outline of the schoolyard itself. After that, every student would copy the map onto a piece of paper. They would thus each have a map of their own. We then sent them home with an assignment to draw a map showing the route they take from home to school.

Drawing the original map in the dirt went well. Though it took a few minutes for students to get involved, soon they were grabbing for the stick each time one of them finished with it, jumping to make a correction or add a new detail. There was a lot of discussion of the shape of the schoolyard, and lots more about how to represent the school’s principle building.

The latter point was especially striking. Most of them wanted to represent the building with a drawing that showed it as they see it when standing in front, as though one were to draw a map of Manhattan with pictures of the front of each skyscraper showing where it stands. I asked them to consider what the building would look like if they were looking at it from the air, where they would have to be to see the schoolyard the way we had drawn it. One or two were able to trace a bird’s eye view of the school, and others were willing to agree with them, but it was clear enough that this wasn’t how they saw things.

Things started to get really interesting when they began to copy the map onto their own sheets of paper. The schoolyard has an odd shape. The front wall is much shorter than the back fence. As you face the school, the left-hand boundary slants inward making an acute angle with the front of the property. Its short – only about fifteen students long – and then makes an obtuse angle with the back of the property, which extends well off towards the right. The right-hand boundary then curves inward to meet the front border.

Most of the kids, however, traced the property as a rectangle, drawing its boundary a quarter- to a half-inch inside the edge of the paper they used. A few introduced a slight irregularity in the shape, pinching the boundaries on the back right-hand side to leave a little bulge. But those bulges were nothing like the way the property extends. It was as though neither the shape of the property nor the shape of the map they had already drawn together had anything to do with their choice. It was the shape of the paper that was guiding them.

The maps they drew of their routes from home to school were just as telling. They showed roads curving gracefully, positioning the houses evenly around the page. So when Guifobert suggested that we simply bend the back boundary inward to fit on the blackboard, he was neither kidding nor trying to take an easy way out of the problem we found ourselves facing. He was expressing the way he and most of his classmates were approaching the task. They were thinking like artists, arranging objects on a canvas.

Enel and I had originally planned to move quickly from what we naively expected to be simple maps of the students’ routes to school to a writing assignment: We would ask the students to write out directions. But it turns out that things will need to move forward more slowly than that.

Two things are clear. On one hand, we need to keep them working together, whether in small groups or as a single large class. The chance to argue with one another, to correct one another and be corrected, took them much farther as mapmakers than any was able to travel by themselves.

One the other hand, we need to help the students think more clearly about the difference between drawings and maps. We need to help them draw more from observation, and less from the constraints that the paper in front of them provides. Taking the trouble to measure out the schoolyard with their bodies might have been a first step. As they work to infuse their maps with more information about distances, sizes, and shapes, they may become more inclined to impose their vision on the paper they use.

If nothing else, stretching ourselves hand-to-hand around the schoolyard was lots of fun.

Discussion groups should never stop learning. Or maybe it would be better to say that, if they feel that they have no more to learn together, they probably no longer need to be a group.

I had been working with the women from Kofaviv – the Commission of Women Victims for Victims – for about a year, and I had begun to feel that they had reached a plateau, that they were no longer moving forward. They are an accomplished group, both in our work together and otherwise. We could simply have decided to continue enjoying the pleasant meetings that we have, or to end our collaboration, but neither of those options seemed right.

They have learned to follow Wonn Refleksyon procedures more than competently. They are fearless in the face of texts that other groups in Haiti have thought to be too hard. For example, whereas Haitian university students and others have doubted whether one can even discuss Newton’s laws of motion, or at least whether someone without a fair amount of education is qualified to talk about such things, the women of Kofaviv, who range from high school graduates to women without any formal education at all, have simply done it. They listen to one another and encourage one another to speak. Each of them seems to recognize that she has something to say. As a result, any one of them might be the next one to speak at any time. This is true when I’m the one leading their conversations, but it’s just as true when one of them is playing that role. We take turns leading, and they respond well to one another just as they respond very, very well to me. It’s wonderful.

At the same time, I can’t get away from my sense that there are steps the group hasn’t taken. While they are really good at helping one another share their thoughts, I don’t see much evidence that their thoughts are changing, or developing. One of Wonn Refleksyon’s core objectives is to make our opinions visible to us in a manner that invites us to challenge them, and I have to admit to myself that the Kofaviv women do not seem to me to be challenging their own thoughts.

So we decided to try a couple of experiments in an effort to shake things up a bit. One was intended to help them make better use of texts, the other to help them rethink what it means for them to lead discussions.

I wanted to help them look at texts differently because I thought the texts they have been using could be much more useful than they’ve been so far. Some of them express puzzling, surprising thoughts. We include a text in which Herodotus quotes the Athenian lawmaker Solon as saying that he can judge no man happy until he’s dead. Some of the texts we use make ordinary thoughts seem surprising. Newton’s explanation of the laws of motion includes the claim that, if a horse pulls a rock, the rock pulls the horse just as much. The example has the power to create more intense and varied discussion than one might imagine.

But the women of Kofaviv rarely find that the texts challenge their thinking because the way they use the texts doesn’t draw that sort of help out of them. They let the texts suggest issues to discuss, but once the texts suggest what we’ll be talking about, more or less, the women don’t much return to them.

For example, one of the postulates that Euclid’s geometry is based on, that a straight line can be drawn from any point to any other point, occasioned a wide-ranging discussion about how they find their various ways around Port au Prince, about how the best route is not always straight. There’s nothing wrong with using the text in that way. We are not a math class. The fact that the text invites them to share their experiences is a good thing. But once they start talking about how to get around Port au Prince, the text can’t help them anymore. They are on their own, and the degree to which they can challenge one another and themselves will simply depend on the habits they’ve already established.

We tried to address the group’s use of the text by spending two weeks working through the Euclid slowly. We all agreed we would temporarily try a different style of work, one that was more focused on figuring out what that text can tell us. We went through it together, almost line-by-line. In order to emphasize that what we were doing was not a standard part of Wonn Refleksyon, we even gave it a different name. We said we would be working in something called a “study group”.

And with the exception of the very interesting discussion of getting around Port au Prince, it seemed to work. The women patiently pieced together different ways of understanding Euclid’s definition of right angles, for example. More importantly, it seemed to help them in the weeks that followed when we returned to our usual style. Shortly afterwards I led them in a discussion of a short excerpt from one of Darwin’s books, and they were willing to let it puzzle them and raise questions about some of their own thoughts.

The second experiment was very different, and it’s far too early to hazard a guess as to its results. It took shape in a conversation with Kerline, a lab technician who does blood tests for the rape victims that come in a too-constant stream to the Kofaviv office. Kerline is a strong member of the group, and has begun working with Frémy and me on other Wonn Refleksyon projects. She and I were talking about a discussion we led together at the office of a large international NGO in Pétion-Ville. Kerline said that what she felt she was learning as she worked with Frémy and me – and a third experienced leader named Abélard – was how to intervene in the discussions she leads with confidence.

This requires some explanation. The first thing that generally strikes Haitians about the way Frémy and I lead discussions is how relatively silent we are. Group leaders in Haiti generally dominate. Haiti is not unique in this respect. They do most of the talking, they respond to almost everything that others say, and they always have the last word. Compared to what the Haitians we work with are accustomed to, Frémy and I really are quiet. We push people to talk directly with one another, to set the course of their own conversation, and to do without a leader’s final word. Most of this we try to accomplish by simply leaving them the space to take these responsibilities on. In other words, by shutting our own mouths long enough so that others can talk.

One consequence of this is that many of the people who learn the process from us are reticent about asserting themselves. They can tend to think that shutting up is their role. When they do speak, it’s generally in one of two simple ways: Either they’re reminding participants of the rules that Wonn Refleksyon asks them to follow, or they’re expressing an opinion about the topic being discussed much as any participant might.

Kerline said that she thought that the members of the Kofaviv group needed to think more about what real leadership requires. They are good at encouraging participation and at energizing their groups, at monitoring rules, and at entering the groups they lead as one participant among equals. But they weren’t actively helping one another deepen their collaboration or their thinking. They were, rather, just letting things happen.

So we decided to spend a meeting focusing on what discussion leadership requires. We proceeded in four steps. First, we asked the women to separate into groups of five-six. Each group was to make three short lists: one of the three qualities of a good traditional classroom teacher, one of the three qualities of a good community organizer, and a third of the qualities of a good discussion leader. Neither Kerline nor I were very interested in the first two lists, but we thought that creating the three lists together would help the women concentrate on the most essential, unique qualities of a discussion leader.

Second, we brought the small groups back together and made a list of all the qualities of a discussion leader they had proposed. There were eight in all, including things like the ability to be on time, the abilities to motivate participants to come to meetings and encouraging them to participate actively once they come, and the ability to explain procedures clearly.

The third step was for the group to grade itself on each of the eight qualities. We decided to keep things simple. For each quality, they would say they are good, weak, or between the two.

There was a lot of consensus about these grades, and they graded themselves much as Kerline and I would have. There were only two points on which they gave themselves the lowest grade: One was for them not to be shy, and the other was to know when to intervene.

It turned out that these amounted to the same thing. The shyness that some of them were worried about was precisely a shyness about when to intervene strongly in a conversation. And a little talk was able to make this more precise. They don’t feel they’re timid about intervening to enforce the rules or that they’re timid about jumping in as participants with their own contributions. They feel they’re too timid, however, about jumping in to a conversation to change its direction: to suggest paths that might be more fruitful that the one a group is taking, to push a group to stick to a topic so they can deepen their reflections, to keep things from merely jumping from one opinion to another.

The fourth step we took was to return to small groups so that they could think about how to work on their ability to intervene decisively and well. Though the groups worked independently, they answered as if with one voice. They said that they don’t think they’re good at preparing for a discussion they are to lead. They think that if they had a clearer sense, from the outset, as to where a discussion might profitably go, if they were better able to formulate clear objectives before a group meets, it would be easier for them to feel as though they know what they’re doing.

It was an obvious point, but one neither Kerline nor I had considered. So we decided that we would all think about what we can do to learn how to better prepare for the discussions we are to lead. It will be a couple of weeks before I see the group again, and we all agreed we would come with ideas.

I haven’t come up with anything yet, but it’s a great question. If we are able to come up with a really good approach, it could quickly become an important part of teaching Wonn Refleksyon all over Haiti.