Discussions are a great tool for engaging students in active learning. As Svinicki and McKeachie (2014) explain, discussions give students an opportunity to “integrate, apply, and think” (p. 39).
The resources below will help you to identify some conditions and strategies for planning and facilitating inclusive discussions that enhance student learning.
General Strategies
- 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. You can refer to this rubric if and when things go off track.
- Assign midterm discussion grades that communicates to students how they are doing in this area. Or you might ask students to assign themselves grades based on criteria you’ve established and shared in advance.
Face-to-Face Strategies
- 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. Actively solicit input from quieter students.
- 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. You can collect written responses as “exit tickets” when students leave the classroom.
Online Strategies
- Provide meaningful, timely feedback: Don’t reply or grade every post. Pick out exemplars, offer private and public appreciation.
- Provide video recaps or written summaries of patterns in the discussion worthy of attention, and give praise to exemplars.
- Focus on quality over quantity: Reduce the number of discussions; use smaller groups instead of larger ones; ask them ahead of time about format/timelines.
Facilitating 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. Below are a few additional tips for facilitating discussion on difficult topics in ways that add to student learning.
Explain the Purpose of Difficult Discussions
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? How might conversations about these topics also engage with your program’s, department’s, or DePaul’s learning outcomes?
For example, using
DePaul’s learning outcomes as a basis, you might consider how difficult conversations might help your students “articulate their own beliefs and convictions, as well as others’ beliefs, about what it means to be human and to create a just society” and “evaluate ethical issues from multiple perspectives and employ those considerations to chart coherent and justifiable courses of action.” (Goal 3: Personal and Social Responsibility)
Consider including a statement in
your syllabus, if appropriate, about how difficult dialogues may factor into the learning goals you’ve established for your course.
Create Ground Rules for Respectful Dialogue
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.
One way to have students create their own ground rules is offered in Brookfield and Preskill’s Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms:
- 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.
If you don’t have time to co-create ground rules with your students, consider adopting some for your class to follow. Here are some sample ground rules for discussion, courtesy of the
Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon:
- Listen actively and attentively.
- Ask for clarification if you are confused.
- Do not interrupt one another.
- Challenge one another, but do so respectfully.
- Critique ideas, not people.
- Do not offer opinions without supporting evidence.
- Avoid put-downs (even humorous ones).
- Take responsibility for the quality of the discussion.
- Build on one another’s comments; work toward shared understanding.
- Always have your book/readings in front of you.
- Do not monopolize discussion.
- Speak from your own experience, without generalizing.
- If you are offended by anything said during discussion, acknowledge it immediately.
- Consider anything that is said in class strictly confidential.
Facilitate Respectful and Productive Discussion
There are a number of strategies you can use to facilitate respectful and productive discussion and to intervene if the discussion gets heated.
Encourage Active Listening and Empathic Responding
Model how to be an active listener by asking follow-up questions meant to aid understanding:
- I think I hear you saying… Is that what you meant?
- Could you tell me more about that?
- What makes this important to you?
- What led you to this view?
You can also ask students who are engaged in a heated exchange to listen carefully to one another and state a summary of what they heard before replying with their own point of view.
Invite Multiple Perspectives
These are some strategies for explicitly inviting multiple perspectives:
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. The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting on Jill DeTemple's teaching practice (and subsequent research) using this model, offers an example of how this approach might work.
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. Doing so, it turns out, can enrich students’ understanding of difficult content, DeTemple has found, since they have an opportunity to consider it in context.
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. Use a collaborative tool like Google Docs or Google Jamboard to create the map.
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.
Provide each student with 3 minutes to talk. After every student has shared, the discussion is open to everyone. In order to speak, students must explicitly connect their ideas to something that has already been said. Read more about this approach to a discussion.
Pause the Discussion
Pause the discussion to let students collect their ideas, reflect, and to allow their emotions to cool. Pausing the discussion also provides you with an opportunity to consider how you can keep the rest of the conversation productive.
“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. Critiques are suspended during this time and only those who can speak in favor of it are allowed to.
The following questions may be used as prompts, if appropriate:
- What’s compelling about this view?
- What are some interesting features of this view that might be missed by those who don’t hold it?
- If you were to believe this view as true, what would be different for you?
- In what sense and under what conditions might this idea be true?
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. You might repeat the activity throughout the discussion and/or refer to the results at the start of any follow-up discussions.
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.
Gather Feedback After the Discussion
Gather feedback at the end of the discussion to encourage students to reflect and to gather information to help inform future discussions. Look for any patterns in the feedback and report back to your students during the next class meeting. You might also invite them to discuss and comment on the findings.
This is another strategy from Brookfield and Preskill, which solicits anonymous student anonymous feedback at the end of each week, and could be adapted to fit other timeframes:
- At what moment in class this week did you feel most engaged with what was happening?
- At what moment in class this week were you most distanced from what was happening?
- What action that anyone (teacher or student) took this week did you find most affirming or helpful?
- What action that anyone took this week did you find most puzzling or confusing?
- What about class this week surprised you the most? (This could be about your own reactions to what when on, something that someone did, or anything else that occurs).
This 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. Responses to these questions could be collected anonymously:
- Topic
- Did you participate today? (Yes/No)
- If not, why not?
- What struck you the most about today’s class? What are you taking away from today?
- What remaining questions do you have about this topic?
Invite your students to provide feedback about how the course is going during the middle of the term. If you’re regularly facilitating difficult discussions in your course, you might build in a specific question that asks students to provide feedback on their experience participating.
See Checking in with Students Using a Midterm Survey for suggestions on incorporating a midterm survey.
See Activities for Metacognition for additional reflection prompts and exercises that you can use while facilitating discussions.
Further Resources
Further Reading
- Brookfield, Stephen D. and Stephen Preskill. Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tool and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms. 2nd Ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.
- “Difficult Dialogues.” Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University.
- “Ground Rules.” Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence, Carnegie Mellon University.
- Hesse, Dianna E. and Paula McAcoy.The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education. 1st Ed. Routledge, 2014.
- “Getting your Class Off to a Great Start.” Center for Teaching Excellence, Lansing Community College.
- Mehl, Caroline and Jonathan Haidt. "How to Defuse a Classroom Conflict: Make It More Complex." Chronicle of Higher Education, 2022.
- Weimer, Maryellen. “First Day of Class Activities that Create a Climate for Learning.” Faculty Focus. Magna Publications, 2013.
References
Brookfield, S.D., & Preskill, S. (1999). Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for a Democratic Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Cashin, W. (2011). “Effective Classroom Discussions.” IDEA Paper #49.
Nilson, L. (2003). "Leading Effective Discussions." Chapter in Teaching at its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors. Second Edition. Bolton, MA.
Paul, R. and Elder, L. (2007).
The Thinker’s Guide to Socratic Questioning. Dillon Beach, CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking.
Rotenberg, R. (2005). "The Discussion Classroom." Chapter in The Art and Craft of College Teaching: A Guide for New Professors and Graduate Students. Walnut Creek, CA.
Stella, J. and Corry, M. (2016). “Intervention in Online Writing Instruction: An Action-theoretical Perspective.” Computers and Composition, 40, 164-174.
Svinicki, M. D. and McKeachie, W. J. (2014). McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Svoboda, T. (2019). “Stop giving me busy work!” Presentation at Wisconsin Distance Learning Conference. Madison, WI.
Online Discussions
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