What does the research tell us

The field known as the scholarship of teaching and learning has been around now for 30, 40 years. And if you had to boil it down to a single insight from that field known as the scholarship of teaching and learning, that insight would be students learn more when they’re actively engaged, as opposed to when students are passive in the classroom. Research shows us that the strategy faculty relying on the most to engage students, is classroom discussion. And that’s a good thing because research also tells us that when students are engaged in discussion, they’re going to learn more.

Research tells us that when students are engaged in discussion, they’re developing their critical thinking skills. And I’m willing to bet that you, as a faculty member, have the development of students’ critical thinking skills as one of the learning outcomes you want students to achieve in your courses. So engaging students in discussion is a good and appropriate thing, but it’s not necessarily an easy thing. There are college classroom norms that work against discussion.

First identified by David Karp and William Yoels in a classic study that occurred in the 1970s, Karp and Yoels identified two classroom norms that sort of undermine effective classroom discussion. One is called civil attention. Well, what’s the difference between expecting students to actually pay attention, and students paying civil attention? Well, civil attention is creating the appearance of paying attention. You don’t necessarily have to be paying attention, but students are expected to create the appearance of paying attention. So how did they do that? Well, they make fleeting eye contact with the instructor. They stay awake. They’re not on their cell phones surfing the web or texting other students. They’re chuckling when you try to be funny in the classroom, right? So students create the appearance of paying attention, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are paying attention. So overcoming civil attention is one challenge.

The other challenge in the Western world of higher education at least, is that a very small number of students in the typical college classroom will do the vast majority of speaking on behalf of their student peers. This is called the consolidation of responsibility for classroom discussion. And I’ll bet you’ve seen it in your classes. You can probably immediately identify those five to maybe eight students who are the dominant talkers in your course. And if you simply let things evolve according to the standard classroom norms, you might have a great discussion with five to eight students while the rest of the class observes you having a great discussion with five to eight students. So those are a couple of the challenges that we have to overcome if we want students to be learning more and developing critical thinking skills through discussion.