Discussion as a Way of Teaching

(Steven Brookfield)

 

Chapter One: Discussion in a Democratic Society

 

Practicing the Dispositions

  1. Hospitality: An atmosphere in which people feel invited to participate.  We spend time relating our own personal histories.  Hospitality implies mutual receptivity to new ideas and willingness to question assumptions.  It does not mean standards are lowered.
  2. Participation: Not everyone has to speak, but everyone must find ways to contribute to others’ understandings.
  3. Mindfulness: Teachers model a high level of attentiveness.  Tact involves holding in check our desire to express ourselves fully and vociferously.  It does not mean compromise or remaining quiet at all times.  Teachers have to resist saying everything they think is important (to give students their money’s worth).
  4. Humility: Acknowledgement that one’s experience and knowledge is limited.
  5. Mutuality: When we devote ourselves to others’ learning as much as our own, the atmosphere of openness that is created encourages engagement (students alternate between roles of teacher and learner).
  6. Deliberation: Group learning is not a debate, or weighing in pros and cons.  The process is more rational—ongoing, thoughtful conversation.
  7. Appreciation: find space to express appreciation to one another.
  8. Autonomy: People can be allowed to hold unpopular opinions.

 

Chapter Two: How Discussion Helps Learning and Enlivens Classrooms

  1. It helps students explore a diversity of perspectives.
  2. It increases students’ awareness of and tolerance for ambiguity or complexity.
  3. It helps students recognize and investigate their own assumptions.
  4. It encourages attentive, respectful listening.
  5. It develops new appreciation for continuing differences.
  6. It increases intellectual agility.
  7. It helps students become connected to a topic.
  8. It shows respect for students’ voices and experiences.
  9. It helps students learn the process and habits of democratic discourse.
  10. It affirms students as co-creators of knowledge.
  11. It develops the capacity for clear communication of ideas and meaning.
  12. It develops habits of collaborative learning.
  13. It increases breadth and makes students more empathetic.
  14. It helps students develop skills of synthesis and integration.
  15. It leads to transformation.

 

Why Teachers Lose Heart for Discussion

  1. Unrealistic expectations: It’s a life-long process and students who are introverts or need time for reflective analysis may find the pace intimidating.
  2. Student unpreparedness: They weren’t made ready for it.
  3. Students don’t know what the teacher values or suspect a hidden agenda.
  4. Lack of ground rules.
  5. Poorly integrated reward systems: Indispensable are clear statements at the outset of the course—verbally and in syllabus—of ways participation will be expected and affirmed.
  6. Failure of Teachers to model discussion

 

Chapter Three: Preparing for Discussion

Lectures can provide opportunity for teachers to model the forms of democratic dispositions they wish to encourage:

  1. Begin every lecture with one or more questions you’re trying to answer.
  2. End every lecture with a series of questions the lecture has raised or left unanswered.
  3. Deliberately introduce periods of silence (every twenty-minutes of lecture) take 3-5 minutes so students can write down important questions, puzzling assertions, question they most want to ask.
  4. Deliberately introduce alternative perspectives: Use lectures to model willingness to consider different views seriously.
  5. Introduce periods of assumption hunting, scrutinizing the assumptions underneath reading, lecture, etc.
  6. Introduce buzz groups into lectures: 3-4 given a few minutes once or twidce during the lecture to discuss a question or issue that arises:
    1. What’s the most contentious statement you’ve heard in lecture today?
    2. What’s the most important point that’s been made so far?
    3. What question would you most like to have answered regarding the topic of the lecture?
    4. What’s the most unsupported assertion you’ve heard in the lecture?
    5. What is the most ambiguous or obscure idea you’ve heard today?
  7. Have students do structured, critical pre-reading
    1. Ask students to write brief papers based on the pre-reading as homework
    2. Pre-reading is structured around critical questions that have no clear resolution
    3. Epistemological questions: culturally biased?  Are central insights grounded in evidence?  What paradigm does the author work from?
    4. Experiential questions: What metaphors are similar to your own experience?  What experiences are omitted?  Any experiences conveyed in text congruent with or contradicted with your own?
    5. Communicative questions: Whose voices are heard?
    6. Political questions: Whose interests are served by the text?  To what extent does this text challenge or confirm existing ideologies, values, and structures.

 

Chapter Four: Getting Discussion Started

  1. Mistakes to avoid at the start of discussion
    1. Don’t start discussion with mini-lecture (subtle messages about what you expect)
    2. Don’t be vague
    3. Don’t fear Silence (don’t answer your own questions); don’t confuse silence with mental inertia.
  2. Declaring a classroom speech policy: give permission to be silent (often this emboldens reticent students to speak)
  3. Frame the discussion around student questions (teachers can assign them as part of pre-reading—best when early in students’ acquaintance with subject; What 3 questions would you like to ask the author about the work?  Students could be prompted by omissions, contradictions, ambiguities, unsupported assumptions, etc.
  4. For visual learners, suggest the class choose a specific image that is actually contained in the text (go around the table and ask each for a specific image-scene-event-moment that stands out in the text
  5. Ask students to complete: What struck me about the text…; the question I’d most like to ask the author…; the idea I most take issue with…; the part of the last lecture that made the most (least) sense was…
  6. Generate truth statements: based on reading, students are split into small groups and each generates 3-4 statements they believe to be true.  This will generate and rank questions and issues for further discussion.
  7. Find a way for students to connect reading/lecture with their own life-experience.  For discussions on topics that seem to have no personal dimensions, focus on critical moments in their attempt to understand the topic.  When most connected, when most distanced from the material; struggles with the topic? 
  8. Discussion in the Round: Common is circle, and teacher is part of that.  Confidents students love this, hesitant students feel vulnerable.
    1. Circle of voices: 4-5 students form a circle, each gets 2-3 minutes to get thoughts organized, then each has 2-3 minutes to speak uninterruptedly.  Then discussion open to free-flow.  Participants can only speak about others’ ideas.
    2. Circular Response Discussions: works on habit of active listening.  Speakers go in circle, they must first summarize previous speaker, then use this as a springboard for their own (no one may be interrupted, no one out of turn; each begins paraphrasing previous person, only remarks related to previous discussion).  Only when everyone speaks, then the floor is opened for general reactions.  Pro: Everyone must listen.  Con: No need to listen expect to the one prior to oneself

 

Chapter Five: Keeping Discussion Going With Questioning, Listening, Responding

  1. Questioning
    1. Questions that ask for more data: how do you know that?  What data is that based on?
    2. Questions for clarification: What’s a good example?  What do you mean by that?
    3. Open Questions: provoke students’ thinking and problem solving abilities such as 1. Linking it to what others have said; 2. Hypothetical questions; 3. Cause and effect questions; and 4. Summary and synthesis questions: What are the one or two most important ideas that emerged from discussion?  What remains unresolved?  What do we need to talk about next time?  Mix it up!
  2. Important to encourage students to receive the text (or other assignment) in its own terms.  Let the voice speak without reaction.

 

Chapter Six: Keeping Discussion Going Through Creative Grouping

  1. Varying group size: large groups can inhibit discussion, allowing only most socially confident (or aggressive) students dominate.  They can also be unwieldy and perpetuate inequalities in class.
  2. Relaxed Buzz groups: 4-5 discuss issues from assignment for 10-15 minutes.  Only talk about issues from the assignment (raise questions, highlight difficult or interesting passages, draw out thesis, suggest serious flaws).  These are good ice-breakers, promotes the idea that discussion can stand on its own.  Con: Could be aimless or degenerate into chitchat.
  3. Structured Buzz Groups: 20 minutes answering questions prepared by teacher, record answers.  Pros: Gives agenda; examines important issues.  Cons: Take initiative out of the hands of students.  One could give them questions but also allow them to explore independent theme.
  4. General guidelines for organizing small group
    1. Five is optimal size. 
    2. When they self-select they feel comfortable and more open, but they less deal with contrasting positions
    3. When intentionally mixed by teacher they have different views, but differences can be intimidating.  Teacher should balance between the two.
  1. Jigsaw: Teacher assigns 5 topics students have to study.  Each becomes an expert.  They first discuss this with other experts on the same topic.  Then new groups form with representatives from every expertise and the “expert” teaches the other students.
  2. Critical Debate
    1. Find a contentious issue
    2. As for volunteers to support the motion and those preparing arguments against it
    3. Announce everyone will be assigned to the team opposite the one volunteered for.
    4. Each team chooses representative.  After initial presentations, they reconvene for rebuttal arguments.  A different person presents these.
    5. Debrief: how did it feel to argue against positions you were committed to?  What new ways of thinking?  Etc.
    6. Have students write follow up: What assumptions about the issue were clarified or confirmed?  Which assumptions surprised you?  How could you check out these new assumptions?  What sources of evidence could you consult?  What new perspectives are out there?  Anything that challenged your way of thinking?
    7. Conversational roles:

a. Theme/problem poser

b.      Reflective analyst: keeps record, giving summary every 20 minutes

c. Scrounger: listens for helpful resources, suggestions, tips that participants have voiced

d.      Devil’s advocate: listens for emerging consensus and formulates contrary view.  This keeps the group in check and helps them explore alternative interpretations.

e. Detective: Listens for unacknowledged, unchecked, and unchallenged biases

f.  Theme spotter: identifies themes that are left unexplored (may form focus for next discussion)

g. Umpire: challenges group to stay away from dismissive, judgmental, offensive comments.

 

Chapter Nine: Keeping Students’ Voices in Balance

Discussions are out of balance when a substantial number of students feel excluded from the discussion for long periods of time.  This does not mean that there cannot be a sustained contribution with one or two people.  It’s a question of the value of this contribution and how it is experienced by the others.  They cannot feel excluded.  It is a common mistake to cut off prematurely an extended and ever-deepening conversation between two participants. 

 

Others are out of participation when the are cut off by others, people raise their hands that they want to join in but others ignore them.  Sometimes non-speakers’ non-verbal cues say it all.

 

When students don’t speak:

    1. Did they complete the preparatory tasks?
    2. Did the teacher build a case for speaking in discussion?
    3. Did the teacher model public critique of his/her ideas?
    4. Did the teacher set up ground rules?
    5. Is the discussion focused on an open-ended question or sufficient complexity and ambiguity?
    6. Has the teacher avoided implicitly answering the question?
    7. Has there been enough time for silence?
    8. Has the teacher assigned tasks and roles to the group members, especially the rotating role of critical opener?
    9. Has the teacher tried to link the topic to the experience of students?