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So, what are the takeaway messages for you as an instructor who wants to utilise discussion as a way of facilitating student learning, as a way of facilitating students’ development of their critical thinking skills? Well, the first message is that effective discussions are rarely a matter of serendipity or happenstance. Yeah, once in awhile, they are, but more often they’re not.
Effective discussions happen because you take the time to prepare and organise your class meeting session in such a way to facilitate that discussion happening. Simply saying, “Are there any questions, who has a comment?” is a lousy way to run a discussion, right? So instead, you’re asking a compelling question that is tied to the reading. You’ve given students an opportunity to collect their thoughts through the kinds of strategies that we’ve talked about. And by collecting their thoughts, whether it’s ahead of time, through instructor-provided discussion questions, or whether it’s during class, with a think-pair share or a small group discussion, when you’ve given students that opportunity and you’ve built it into the class, they are more likely to be prepared and engaged.
So a second takeaway is to remember, discussion is not simply a group of 15 students and an instructor sitting around a conference table at a private institution somewhere with very privileged, wealthy students, but discussion can happen in all kinds of ways. It happens in dyads like think-pair-share. It can happen in small groups. And as we talked about, organising very large enrollment courses with five to eight students in semester-long small groups. And it can happen in whole-class discussion where you as the faculty member, are orchestrating a conversation among the students with you, making sure that it’s not merely those five to eight dominant talkers who are participating, but that you’re engaging every student in discussion in the classroom.
And when you’ve done those things, students are going to be learning more, and they’re going to be developing those critical thinking skills, which we think are so important.
Effective discussions are not the result of serendipity. Like an effective lecture presentation, they happened because the instructor has put forethought into how to structure the class session to facilitate discussion and overcome common challenges. In the process, instructors are shifting ‘the work’ in class from themselves to the students in a supportive, scaffolded way.
Discussion may occur among all the students in a whole class discussion with the instructor. It may occur in dyads, such as with a Think-Pair-Share. And discussion may occur in thoughtfully organised small groups or teams which is an effective means of creating a sense of community in a high enrolment course.
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I want to say thank you for joining in this conversation about discussion. It is awkward as a presenter to be lecturing about discussion. Typically that’s not a really good strategy. So I am looking forward to your input, your comments, your questions, information about the kinds of challenges that you face within your particular context, and hope to join in with you during the discussion board interaction. So thanks for hanging in there with me as we have a conversation about discussion.
Thank you for taking this ‘Teaching by Discussion’ course which has been developed with Jay Howard. We hope you have enjoyed it. Remember to mark this lesson as ‘Mark Complete’ to earn your Course Completion Badge.
Discussions
What main idea for discussion-based teaching would you like to take away from this course?
Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.