Facilitating Class Discussions

Decide on the topic and where this fits in your class.

Create prompts

Creating prompts takes some time. Consider if you were in the role of an interviewer for a major network news show. How you phrase the question is just as important as what you are asking in the first place.

Ideas

• Pick a controversial issue. There is evidence of many benefits to having students discuss controversial topics within your field of study (Kraatz et al., 2022). Of course, you have to set some ground rules. One strategy that can be effective is to assign students to different sides of a controversy and have them research that point of view. In class, they will have a professional debate and represent their assigned side. After the debate, students can express their personal feelings and have a discussion. This is helpful because they have all had to research and understand those who fall on either side of the argument. This builds empathy and can help shed light on others’ views prior to simply opening the floor to a personal debate about topics.
• Using a bank of sentence starters is a great way to introduce new forms of dialogue. The use of sentence starters encourages high level language usage as well as a structure to the conversation which some students find difficult. It must be noted that students may be somewhat reluctant to the formality of using sentence starters in the first few applications. After several discussion sessions using this strategy, dialogue begins to flow much more naturally.
  • An example of a partner discussion using sentence starters may be “the author makes an interesting point on page __, they say (read the short excerpt). I understand this to mean ______.” Partner then will respond by choosing either a clarifying question or validating what they agree to be true based on what they heard.
  • Following the partner discussion, the students switch partners and use a new sentence starter to share discussion points from previous conversations. The application here is to practice careful listening skills. An example would be “my partner (name) and I discussed part of the book where the author introduces ______. We determined this to mean ______.

Online

• For online class discussions, students often benefit from clear instructions. You may find it helpful to provide a few bullet points or other manner of identifying some main items you want each student to cover in their initial post.
• Allow students to create video or audio posts and replies so they can connect a bit more with their peers.
• If you have a large group or several topics in a given discussion prompts, consider putting students into smaller groups within Canvas so they are only needing to read through a handful of initial posts before replying. This can save your students time and it gives them an opportunity to get to know a few of their classmates with each discussion.
• Include application task/prompt within the online discussion – so it is relevant practice with content from the class and provides meaningful platform for discussion (beyond what do you think about X, instead it becomes – how did you do Y? I wasn’t sure about....etc.)

Face-to-Face

• One idea is to mix up how you are asking your students to present the information. Read about the use of Photovoice in an online class discussion (Reyes-Foster & DeNoyelles, 2018). This practice is similar to how students are communicating in social media, but the extension is that students must connect the photo to the content.
• Carousel Presentations
  • Several students set up presentations in different locations in the classroom. Students who are not presenting attend each presentation/discussion topic. Presenters become familiar with their content area and those attending each presentation engage in conversation about the topic at hand.
• Using physical movement is a great way to encourage dialogue between students that don’t typically interact, offering alternative points of view.  Physical movement looks different depending on your classroom environment.  Some options would be setting up stations around the room, forming two lines facing one another, or using two circles, one inside facing out and the other outside facing inward, or simply asking students to sit in different seats for the discussion.
• Using a visual reference to facilitate whole group discussion about a topic encourages students to make close observations which serve as evidence.  An image that works best has various details to see and discuss.  Observations may include facial expression, body language, style of dress, or interaction between subjects in a photograph or work of art.  When discussed in a group setting, students become aware of details they may not have originally seen and use many points of view to build conclusions based on this visual evidence. 

At the most basic level, do you feel like your students were using your content-specific vocabulary in an authentic way? Were they actually talking about what you wanted them to talk about?

For face-to-face – consider asking students to hand you an “Exit ticket” on the way out of the classroom where they write down one thing they learned today from their peers in the discussion. 

Encouraging classroom collaborations has many benefits. Hard and RaoShah (2022) note the difficulty of identifying criteria for classroom participation, and instead, recommend trying new ideas to get students working together such as utilizing interactive discussions. Facilitating discussions and helping students learn how to ask questions and talk through the content may benefit their test scores. In a study specific to chemistry, students’ ability to critically think and ask difficulty questions during class were more likely to have higher exam scores (Bergey et al., 2022).

References 

Bergey, B. W., Cromley, J. G., Kaplan, A., & Bloxton, J. D. (2022). Do students’ questions during chemistry lectures predict perceived comprehension and exam performance? The Journal of Experimental Education, 91(3), 411-430. https://doi-org/unk.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/00220973.2021.2021843

Hard, B. M., RaoShah, T. (2022). Developing collaborative thinkers: Rethinking how we define, teach, and assess class participation. Teaching of Psychology, 49(2), 176-184. https://doi-org.unk.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/0098620986953

Kraatz, E., von Spiegel, J., Sayers, R., & Brady, A. C. (2022). Should we “just stick to the facts”? The benefit of controversial conversations in classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 61(3), 312-324. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2022.2096381

Reyes-Foster, B. M., & DeNoyelles, A. (2018). Using the photovoice method to elicit authentic learning in online discussions. Journal of Teaching and Learning with Technology, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.14434/jotlt.v7i1.23596