Facilitating Engaging Learning Strategies Through Effective Discussions
Discussions are a powerful tool for engaging students in active learning. They provide an opportunity for students to integrate, apply, and think critically about the material (Svinicki & McKeachie, 2014). This article explores strategies for planning and facilitating inclusive discussions that enhance student learning.
The Power of Discussion in Learning
Discussions offer distinct advantages over other engagement methods. They allow students to articulate their understanding, challenge assumptions, and learn from diverse perspectives. Being explicit about the goals for class discussions is crucial. What do you hope to achieve? Increased critical thinking? Improved communication skills? A deeper understanding of the subject matter? Clearly communicating these goals to students sets the stage for productive discussions.
Setting the Stage for Successful Discussions
Preparation is Key
Tell students how you expect they will prepare for discussions. Consider asking students to prepare beforehand by drafting 2-3 questions or written responses to questions shared beforehand. This ensures that students come to the discussion with thoughtful contributions.
Establishing Ground Rules
Establish ground rules for how discussions should proceed. Co-creating these rules with students can foster a sense of ownership and responsibility. If you don’t have time to co-create ground rules with your students, consider adopting some for your class to follow. These rules should promote respectful communication, active listening, and constructive disagreement.
Building a Comfortable Environment
Get students to talk to one another from day one. Use icebreakers on the first day of class to help them begin feeling comfortable talking to their peers (and you) and to help them learn everyone's names. A comfortable environment is essential for open and honest dialogue.
Read also: Understanding PLCs
Facilitation Techniques for Engaging Discussions
Guiding the Conversation
Use open-ended questions and don’t be afraid to follow up with “Why?” or “Tell me more about that” if a student’s first attempt at responding could be developed further. Remember to wait for students to have a sufficient amount of time to consider your questions. Ask students to take a minute to write down their thoughts before sharing.
Modeling Civility
Role model civility by demonstrating how you can disagree with someone without disparaging them. Refer to the ground rules you’ve established with students if and when things get heated.
Encouraging Student Interaction
Encourage and empower students to respond to one another and not just you as the instructor. Redirect questions addressed solely to you as an authority back to the larger group as appropriate.
Enlarging the Scope
Enlarge questions to include all students. For example, if you ask a question, or present an opposing viewpoint to one student, open the discussion to the whole group with questions like: “What do you all think of that?” Doing this can help to mitigate student concerns that there is only one correct response.
Small Group Discussions
It can feel less risky for students to share answers or opinions in smaller groups. Divide students into groups and allow time for them to discuss before joining back to the larger group.
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Student Leadership
Assign student leaders for class sessions or modules that involve discussion. Require leaders to share discussion questions in advance of their sessions and have the rest of the class submit written responses to them.
Engaging Activities for Enhanced Discussion
Creative Activities
Consider how other activities can engage your students in small group discussion. Create something: Ask students to write a poem, create a concept map or sketch out a design. These activities not only foster higher-order thinking skills but also give students more opportunities to gain collaboration skills, which are often prized in the workplace. Play a game. Ask students to play or create a learning game, or a template for PowerPoint or Google Slides.
Investigative Activities
Investigate something: Ask students to work together to explore a question, gather and develop evidence, and present a research-based argument.
Analytical Activities
Critique something: Ask students to analyze and evaluate an artifact. This could be a writing sample, philosophical argument, mathematical proof, hypothetical scenario, etc.
Specific Discussion Techniques
Socratic Questioning
Named after the Athenian philosopher Socrates, this approach to discussion asks probing questions and can be useful to examine the depth of thinking by your students. It can also be a powerful method of inquiry that students can adopt themselves. Entire books have been written on this approach (such as Paul & Elder, 2007), but in general the modes of questioning revolve around analyzing thoughts and systems of thinking.
Read also: Learning Civil Procedure
Polling Tools
Use a polling tool such as Poll Everywhere to solicit and share answers to questions that you pose in real time. This approach can be particularly effective in larger classes. You can use a clickable image question instead of physically moving around the classroom with Poll Everywhere.
Think-Pair-Share
Pose a question or present a problem, then give students 1-5 minutes to think through (or write down) their response. Next, have students turn to a partner (or join breakout rooms containing 2 or 3 students) and discuss their ideas. Finally, ask students to share what came up in their pair discussions in a whole class discussion.
Jigsaw
Break students into small groups. Each group is tasked with solving some aspect of one problem or prompt. After working it out, each group takes turns explaining their piece of the puzzle.
Four Quadrants
Have students get up and out of their seats with this discussion starter strategy. Hang large sticky posters with values ascribed to them, such as a Likert scale responses (strongly agree, agree, etc.) or frequency responses (always, sometimes, etc.), in the four quadrants of the classroom. Then ask students to move to the different quadrants based upon their responses to your questions. You can use their movements to ask probing or clarifying questions.
Adapting Discussions for Different Modalities
Flex Courses
For flex courses, consider how much in-person students will be able to spread out during breakout sessions. If students are too close together, it will be difficult for other participants to hear them due to the background chatter from other students sitting nearby. If two or more in-person students are in the same breakout room, it will be particularly important that they sit as far away from each other as possible to avoid an audio feedback loop.
Online Discussions
Revisit the number of discussion forums in your course, with a focus on quality over quantity. Require students to publish their responses first, hiding other students’ responses until they do so. This helps spur original thinking and writing while reducing the temptation to plagiarize. Require students to publish an initial post a few days before a forum’s deadline, in order to encourage the likelihood of conversations beginning prior to just before the deadline. Ask students to answer questions or respond to posts that have not been addressed yet, even if those questions/posts do not correspond to their preferred topic (this can encourage earlier participation as well). Don’t feel like you need to respond to every single thread; be strategic by replying to threads that do not have any replies or by helping students to identify connections between their threads. Encourage students to change the subject or title of the post when replying. This makes it easier for everyone to scan the discussion and see where their ideas might fit. Ask students to compose in or link to other media and formats. For example, students may submit short videos, audio recordings, or narrated PowerPoints. Or they may bolster their arguments by embedding images or videos in their responses. You might ask students to critique one another’s work in the subsequent week. Tools like Voicethread can also be used as a multimedia-rich platform that enables asynchronous discussions.
Assessment and Feedback
Defining a Good Discussion
Define what a good discussion looks like. You might even do this with your students. Then create a checklist or rubric that maps out the elements of a good discussion and share with your students. Assign midterm discussion grades that communicates to students how they are doing in this area.
Monitoring Participation
Take note of who is participating and who is not participating in class discussions. Avoid only looking at the students who are talking and limit excessive talkers’ contributions.
Gathering Feedback
Reserve five minutes at the end of class and ask students to evaluate the effectiveness of the discussion in small groups or in a free write. Provide meaningful, timely feedback: Don’t reply or grade every post. Look for any patterns in the feedback and report back to your students during the next class meeting. What about class this week surprised you the most? End of Class Reflection Exit TicketThis End of Class Reflection from “Creating a Brave Space Through Classroom Writing” by Lucia Pawlowski in Teaching Race (2019) works well as an exit ticket. Did you participate today? What struck you the most about today’s class? Invite your students to provide feedback about how the course is going during the middle of the term by using a Midterm Survey.
Navigating Difficult Discussions
Difficult discussions-often involving race, class, politics, religion and gender-can be anxiety-provoking experiences. You might be worried about being forthright with your opinions without hurting another person’s feelings, or about being able to anticipate or even control the outcome of the discussion. However, if you and your students approach conversations about difficult topics from a place of respect and openness to other viewpoints, those conversations can lead to authentic learning. The suggestions for facilitating discussions are a great starting point for facilitating difficult discussions.
Preparation and Ground Rules
Before your course begins, reflect on potential “hot button” topics that relate to your course and the learning outcomes you have established for your students. How do these topics intersect with what you want your students to learn? If you co-create ground rules for respectful dialogue with your students, you can establish expectations early on and have something to fall back on if things get heated later in the quarter. Doing so also indicates that you take discussion seriously as a valuable learning experience.
Reflective Dialogue
Individually, have students reflect on the best discussions they’ve ever had, and give them some time to write down a few characteristics that made them so memorable. Then have students consider the worst discussions they’ve ever had, and have them write down a few characteristics of these discussions. Have your students break into groups and share their reflections, beginning with the positive experiences and then the negative. Have students take notes on what patterns emerge-what do they have in common about their experiences with good discussions, and what made the bad ones so awful for everyone? Taking account of both the positive and negative characteristics that emerge, have students write down at least three suggestions to propose as ground rules for discussion. Have each group report back, making note of each suggestion on the board. Are there suggestions that came up more than once? Are there suggestions that the whole group endorses as significant? Identify the most important ones and incorporate them as the ground rules for future class discussions.
Reflective Structured Dialogue
Consider using a therapeutic model like Reflective Structured Dialogue. Using an approach developed by a group of family therapists in Boston decades ago, Jill DeTemple has found good results when things get heated in her religious studies classes at Southern Methodist University. Reflective Structured Dialogue opens … with the facilitator having participants tell a story that has informed [their approach to a difficult topic]. So to start off a discussion about guns, for instance, students might share their experiences hunting as a child, or describe an act of gun violence that touched their lives. Next, participants talk about the values that underlie these experiences. Then they talk about any ways in which they feel pulled in competing directions on the issue. That third question, DeTemple says, is meant to bring out empathy. Only after working through the three starting prompts do participants start asking each other questions. The goal is not to have anyone switch sides, she said. It’s to help students change the way they relate to one another, to listen and consider different perspectives.
Mapping Exercise
Work as a whole class to map responses and reactions to a current event or issue. These might include actions, emotions, political positions, articles, videos, etc. This exercise is adapted from The Center for New Designs in Scholarship and Learning, as part of their suggested activities for teaching during an election.
Circle of Voices
Provide each student with 3 minutes to talk. After every student has shared, the discussion is open to everyone.
Pause and Reflect
Pause the discussion to let students collect their ideas, reflect, and to allow their emotions to cool.
The Five-Minute Rule
“The Five-Minute Rule,” as explained by Brookfield and Preskill, is a strategy that seeks to provide a remedy to marginalized views being discounted or ignored during a class discussion. If anyone during class feels that a perspective is being marginalized, then they can invoke “The Five-Minute Rule,” at which point the class takes five minutes to contemplate the potentially marginalized point of view from the perspective of its proponents.
In a Word
Provide students with 5 minutes to write reflectively. Then, ask students to identify how they’re feeling or where they’re at using just one word. Ask students to share that word with the whole class via a tool like PollEverywhere, Zoom polling, a Google Doc, the chat tool built into Zoom or Microsoft Teams, or in person via a white board, sticky notes, etc. Identify trends or ask students to identify trends.
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