Teachers cannot expect students to share a common understanding of the term discussion. Nor can they assume that students have any positive disposition toward the method. In fact, many students will actively resist discussion and do their best to undermine it with sarcasm, silence, or acting out for the benefit of peers. They may have learned from past experience that supposedly democratic discussions are often a thin veneer for maintaining traditional teacher power through apparently nontraditional means. They may also have seen discussions reproduce the differences of race, class, and gender that exist in the wider society. So teachers cannot expect that students are ready and willing to engage in discussion, much less able to do so. Teachers must earn the right to ask students to take the process seriously by showing them what democratic discussion looks like and convincing them that participating in discussion is worth their time and energy.
Learning the dispositions and practices of democratic talk takes time and effort. Given that engaging in critical discussion is difficult, how can we help people learn to do this sooner rather than later? One of the keys to good discussion is preparing students and teachers adequately for what lies ahead. In this chapter we offer a number of suggestions on what might be done before the discussion begins to prepare people for democratic talk.
One prerequisite for good discussion is that participants be as fully informed as possible about the topic under consideration. Of course, being fully informed is an ideal. Few people could be said to be completely informed about all aspects and dimensions of a phenomenon at any one time. As an ideal, however, striving to ensure that participants have access to full information is of enormous political significance. Educators concerned to help learners gain access to all relevant information about an issue fight to ensure that all relevant perspectives, no matter how politically contentious, are available. This gives them a clear mandate to engage in political action when it is obvious that certain interests wish to keep information (about, for example, conditions of economic inequity or moral injustice) in the hands of the few and out of the minds of the many.
How can we ensure that all students have equal access to as full a range of relevant materials as possible? One way is to place these materials in an accessible location well before a course starts. This might be a physical location, as in the case of a university library that has the course’s required materials on reserve or a bookstore that sells copies of them. Or it might be an electronic location, as in the case of an electronic bulletin board or listserv that either provides the resources or explains how they can be accessed via electronic means. But all these approaches depend on students’ being relatively privileged. They must be fortunate enough to own a car so that they can drive to the library, and they must have enough discretionary time to be able to consult library materials beforehand. If they are purchasing required texts, they need money over and above what they’re paying for tuition, traveling expenses, and child care. And they may have to find this money out of a budget that’s further reduced by the students’ not being paid while they are away from work. To access electronic information, they must have access to computer technology and have enough discretionary time to learn how to manipulate computer software. If they are enormously privileged, of course, they can pay someone to drive to the library or bookstore or to retrieve the materials electronically on their behalf.
A simple way to equalize access to resources is to make sure that a package of materials is sent to all students well before the course begins. This means planning the opening sessions of a course several months beforehand so that you have time to track down, duplicate, and distribute these materials. If all students in a course are lucky enough to have access to computers, you can send disks containing prereading material to them through the mail. You could also post the materials on your Web site several weeks before the course begins and have students download them at their leisure. It is important that when students receive these materials, they know what to do with them. We like to ask students to do the prereading before class begins and to bring to the first class meeting photocopies of a short paper they have written in response to the prereading. These photocopies are distributed to other class members, who read them and use them to frame the opening discussions.
One of the traps that advocates of discussion methods often fall into is setting up a false dichotomy between lecturing and discussion. They give the impression that anyone who lectures combines the moral sensitivity of Caligula with the democratic impulses of Stalin. If you lecture, so their argument goes, you only serve to confirm your authoritarian, demagogic tendencies. This is a disservice to well-intentioned colleagues and a gross misunderstanding of pedagogical dynamics. Exhorting colleagues to stop lecturing altogether and use only discussion forces teachers to make a choice between what seem to be two mutually exclusive options.
We believe that this pedagogical bifurcation is wrong. Lectures are not, in and of themselves, oppressive and authoritarian, and lecturers are not, by definition, demagogues. Similarly, discussions are not, in and of themselves, liberating and spontaneous, and discussion leaders are not, by definition, democratic. We have both been participants in discussion sessions where leaders manipulate the group to reach certain predefined conclusions. Through their power to control the flow of talk, to summarize and reframe students’ comments, and to respond favorably to some contributions and unfavorably to others, discussion leaders can act in extremely authoritarian ways.
Instead of reducing questions of pedagogical method to a simplistic dichotomy—discussion good, lecture bad—we see these two methods as complementary. We agree with Paulo Freire’s observation that “a liberating teacher will illuminate reality even if he or she lectures” (Shor and Freire, 1987, p. 40). So we want to argue that lectures can provide a wonderful opportunity for teachers to model the forms of democratic dispositions they wish to encourage in discussion. Here are some ideas on how this might happen.
• Begin every lecture with one or more questions that you’re trying to answer. Posing these questions at the outset of your talk means you frame the lecture as part of your continuous effort to make sense of a subject. This suggests that you see education as a never-ending process of inquiry in which you’re constantly trying to come to a point of greater understanding, all the while acknowledging that whatever truths you claim are provisional and temporary. If students are used to you opening all your lectures by raising a series of framing questions, they’ll be more accepting when you frame discussions around a question or questions to be explored.
• End every lecture with a series of questions that your lecture has raised or left unanswered. Lecturers are often told that the golden rule of effective lecturing is to “tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em, tell ’em, and then tell ’em what you’ve told ’em.” The problem with this rule is that it presents the lecture as a statement of indisputable truth. Doing this is inimical to intellectual inquiry. In particular, ending with a summary of what’s already been said establishes a sense of definitive closure—the last word on the subject has been spoken. We believe that good lecturers should end their presentations by pointing out all the new questions that have been raised by the content of the lecture and also by pointing out which of the questions posed at the start of the lecture have been left unanswered or been reframed in a more provocative or contentious way. This prepares students for the practice we advocate of ending discussion sessions by asking students to volunteer the questions the discussion has raised for them (rather than by giving a summary of “what we’ve learned today in our discussion”).
If possible, lecturers should spend the last ten minutes of a lecture asking students to write down the questions the lecture has raised for them and then find a way to make some of these public. Students can be asked to announce their questions to the whole class, to share them with each other in groups of two or three, or to write them down, pass them to the lecturer, and have the lecturer read out a random selection.
• Deliberately introduce periods of silence. One barrier to good discussion is people’s belief that conversation means continuous talk. We believe that periods of reflective silence are as integral to good discussion as the most animated speech. Participants in discussion must feel comfortable saying, “I need to think about that a minute or two before I respond,” and then be ready to take that time to think before speaking. Others in the group should not feel they have to fill this “vacuum” of silence with speech. They need to learn that silence does not represent a vacuum in discussion. Rather, it signifies a different but equally significant and intense engagement with the subject of discussion.
Lecturers can prepare students for periods of reflective silence in discussions by introducing such silences into their lectures. They can tell students they need a minute to think about what they want to say next and then take that full minute. After every twenty minutes or so of uninterrupted lecture, they can call for three to five minutes of silent reflective speculation. During this time students can think about the preceding twenty minutes and write down the most important point they felt was made, the most puzzling assertion, or the question they most would like to ask. At the end of these few minutes of silent reflection, students can spend a couple of minutes sharing their ideas in pairs or triads, volunteer to announce their ideas to the whole class, or write them down and pass them to the lecturer, who will read out a random selection.
• Deliberately introduce alternative perspectives. Participating in discussion involves exposing oneself to a variety of alternative ideas and perspectives. We can use lectures to model this willingness to consider different viewpoints seriously and nondefensively. One way to do this is to present as part of our lecture any arguments that counter our own assertions. A dramatic and theatrical approach is to state your opening position while you stand in one part of the room and then to move to another part of the room, look back at where you were standing, and direct a second set of comments at that spot. This second set of comments should be counterarguments or rebuttals. When you do this, you address your imaginary other selves by name, saying things like “Stephen, what you’re omitting to mention is” or “Of course, Stephen, you could pursue a very different line of reasoning if you argue that. . . .”
Another approach is to bring one or more colleagues into your lecture who disagree with your presentation and give them some time to speak their views. By listening respectfully and then following their presentations with a brief period of discussion in which you acknowledge and explore your differences, you model the kind of respectful attention to diverse perspectives that you hope will be paralleled in students’ discussions.
• Introduce periods of assumption hunting. One of the purposes of discussion is to encourage critical thinking, which involves students in identifying and scrutinizing the assumptions that inform their ideas and actions. We can show students what this looks like by first introducing periods of “assumption hunting” into our lectures. These are moments when we stop professing what we believe and spend a few minutes in a “time-out” compiling the assumptions on which our beliefs rest and musing on how we might investigate them. We do this musing aloud in front of our students. When students see us identifying our assumptions and subjecting them to critical scrutiny, it gets them used to the idea that doing this is a regular part of discussion.
• Introduce buzz groups into lectures. Students can begin to acquire the habit of discussion by participating in brief buzz group sessions during lectures. Buzz groups are usually made up of three or four students who are given a few minutes once or twice during a lecture to discuss a question or an issue that arises. The best kind of questions ask students to make some judgments regarding the relative merits, relevance, or usefulness of the constituent elements of the lecture. Here are some examples of such questions:
What’s the most contentious statement you’ve heard so far in the lecture today?
What’s the most important point that’s been made in the lecture so far?
What question would you most like to have answered regarding the topic of the lecture today?
What’s the most unsupported assertion you’ve heard in the lecture so far?
Of all the ideas and points you’ve heard so far today, which is most obscure or ambiguous to you?
In their buzz groups, students are asked to take turns giving a brief response to the question asked and to note if one response draws particular agreement or produces significant conflict. When the three-minute buzz group period is up, the lecturer asks for random responses to the questions asked or for comments about the discussions that occurred. Buzz groups are useful minidiscussions that get students used to talking to each other while completing a task at hand. If you split students into triads during a lecture and ask them to “discuss the significance of what they’ve heard so far,” that task can seem so momentous or impenetrable that it precludes productive conversation. But a focused buzz group gets students involved in discussion almost without their realizing this is happening. We will have more to say about buzz groups in Chapter Six.
One of our strongest convictions about discussion is that students learn to speak in critical and democratic ways by watching people in positions of power and authority model these processes in their own lives. As teachers committed to modeling critical thinking in our own practice, we have found the critical incident questionnaire (CIQ) to be very useful in this process.
The CIQ is a simple classroom evaluation tool that we use to find out what and how students are learning. It consists of a single sheet of paper (with attached carbon) containing five questions, all of which focus on critical moments or actions in a program or class, as judged by the learners. Beneath each question, space is provided for learners to write down whatever they wish. The CIQ is handed out to learners about ten minutes before the end of the last class of the week. The five questions are always the same:
As learners write their responses to these questions, the carbon provides a copy that they can keep for themselves. This allows them to review their responses over the length of the course and to notice habitual preferences, dispositions, and points of avoidance in their learning.
As learners exit the room, they leave the top copies of their CIQ facedown on a table by the door, or they give their sheets to a peer who then hands the whole bundle to the teacher. The CIQ sheets are never signed, so teachers have no idea who wrote what. This anonymity is crucial. It means that participants can be as brutally honest and critically frank as they like, with no possibility of recrimination. If some learners put their names on the forms in the early stages of a course, we ask them to stop doing this. We explain that we’re looking for honest, accurate commentary on the class, and we know they will feel constrained about what they write if they have to put their names to their comments. We address the power differential in college classrooms head on and stress that the reason CIQ responses are anonymous is so that no one will feel that writing negative comments will adversely affect his or her grade. We also say that we know the students won’t believe that we welcome their criticism, since they’ve probably seen too many professors espouse that belief and then punish students who challenge professorial competence and authority.
After everyone has left the room, we start to read the responses. For a typical class of about thirty students, it will take us fifteen to twenty minutes to get a sense of the clusters of ideas and main themes on the forms. We jot down notes on the chief clusters and themes and sometimes verbatim comments that encapsulate several people’s reactions. Sometimes we type this information up on a sheet of paper and make photocopies for everyone in the class. Sometimes we simply use the notes as the basis of a verbal report.
At the first class each week, we report the results of the previous week’s CIQ responses. We invite students’ reactions, comments, questions, and elaborations concerning these responses; then we spend some time discussing what we need to do about what they’ve said or written. Sometimes all that the CIQs reveal is that things are fine and no change or renegotiation is necessary. Sometimes it becomes clear that there are problems we need to talk about. Perhaps the pace of the class is wrong for a substantial number of participants. Perhaps there’s confusion concerning the required assignments. Maybe expectations that we thought we had explained thoroughly didn’t really sink in. Maybe criteria aren’t clear. Or maybe an activity that we thought was going well is actually confusing for some participants. We then spend some time clarifying and negotiating these matters.
Each week students see us trying to understand how our actions as teachers look to them. As we report their CIQ responses to them, we thank them for clarifying and challenging our assumptions. Students’ written responses help illuminate power dynamics in the classroom that we may have thought were absent or unimportant. They point out to us ways in which our affirmations of the democratic process are contradicted by our instinctive, automatic moves to control what happens. When comments critical of our actions turn up on the form, we try to highlight these in our report to the students. Week in, week out, students see us react to their criticisms of us as nondefensively as we can. We try to celebrate their criticisms and point out how much we are learning from them and how this learning is invigorating our practice.
Sometimes it’s very hard to do this. We take their criticisms personally, and we’re devastated by suggestions that we’re acting in anything other than good faith or from the best of intentions. We let them know how hard it is for us to make these criticisms public but how important it is for us to do this if we’re going to ask students to apply the same process of critical analysis to their own ideas in discussion. We explain that we’re trying to earn the right to ask students to think and speak critically by first modeling this in front of them. The overall effect is often very powerful, particularly when students see us putting ourselves in the uncomfortable position of highlighting comments that show us in a bad light. Over time, using the CIQ in this way earns us the right to turn to students and ask that they take the same risk of inviting critical scrutiny of their ideas and actions in discussion.
Before you can get skeptical students to take discussion seriously, you need to demonstrate your own readiness to engage in this activity. African American educator bell hooks (1994, p. 21) writes forcefully about this: “In my classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in any way that I would not share. It is often productive if professors take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material.” One way to demonstrate one’s commitment to the method is to spend some time during the first couple of weeks of a course holding a discussion with colleagues in full view of the group. You can invite to your class several colleagues who are experienced discussion participants or discussion leaders and ask them to engage with you in an unrehearsed discussion of some contentious issue in front of the students. As you do this, you should listen attentively to each other’s comments, reframe and rephrase what you’ve heard, and check with colleagues to make sure you’ve caught their meaning accurately. Try to show how it’s possible for you to disagree respectfully with each other, focusing your critical comments on each other’s ideas rather than being personally derogatory.
Introduce new perspectives by showing how they have been prompted by or are intended to illuminate earlier contributions from others. If possible, clarify in the midst of the discussion how others’ comments are helpful in getting you to recognize and examine critically some familiar assumptions you hold. Thank colleagues for suggesting radically new interpretations or perspectives you had not previously considered. But also allow yourself to reject these and to show that you don’t feel obliged to change your views because of colleagues’ comments. You want to show students that it is quite permissible to be the only one holding a dissenting view in a discussion and that groups should avoid trying to convert holdouts to the majority opinion. And make very sure that you don’t finish by giving a set of conclusions. Instead, finish by listing all the unresolved issues and areas for future inquiry that the discussion has prompted.
You can also use this modeling to show students that silence is a necessary and desirable part of conversation. If one colleague asks another a question that the other has no ready response for, the person asked should feel comfortable saying, “I’m not sure; I’ll need a minute or two to think about that,” and then take that time before responding. During this period, everyone else waits silently. It’s been interesting for us to observe how shocked and uncomfortable students are when they see their teachers just sitting quietly as a group while one of us thinks about what to say next.
Finally, try to avoid talking in a rarefied, overly academic manner. Use specialized terminology when you feel it’s warranted, but try to mix in plenty of colloquial speech and familiar metaphors. Don’t worry about hesitating in midsentence, stumbling to find the right words to express your meaning, starting over, pausing to regroup your thoughts, or letting your words trail off. Better to do this than to strive to make ringing, grammatically impeccable, eloquent, and unequivocal declarations of truth. Our concern is that faculty avoid putting on a beautifully articulated, seamless, exemplary display of dazzlingly erudite, high-status, academic discourse. We want students to see that hesitations, pauses, and colloquial language are a normal part of discussion. If we model discussion participation for students, the last thing we want to do is act as if we are characters in a play by Noel Coward or Tom Stoppard.
Although we advocate modeling the discussion process with colleagues, we admit that we have done so far less than we would like. Time is one factor. We often worry that we’ve sacrificed too much time working on process that should be spent studying content. To add a role-played discussion to a course already full of participatory learning activities can seem like overkill. But mostly our problem is that it’s difficult to convince colleagues that it’s worth their while to spend time modeling the discussion process with us. At the very least, we can offer to return the favor by helping out our colleagues in whatever way they think is useful.
Rules of conduct and codes of behavior are crucial in determining whether or not students take discussion seriously. Although we’ve emphasized that discussions should be completely open regarding the possible directions the conversation could take, and though we’ve condemned the concept of guided discussion, this doesn’t mean we’re opposed to structuring the process of democratic conversation. There is no contradiction in guiding the ways in which people talk to each other while refusing to guide what they talk about. Our experience is that when students know that there are fair and democratic ground rules that frame how people speak, there is a much better chance of getting them involved.
We advocate spending some time at the start of a discussion-based course talking with participants about the ground rules for conversation they’d like to see in operation. How would they like to be spoken to by their peers? What are their feelings about good manners, respect, or courtesy in discussion, and what do these things look like? Do they want discussions to be nothing but talk, or would they like some periods of silence? How do they want to indicate that they’re ready to speak? Should we call on people by a show of hands, deciding on the order of contributions by the order in which people volunteer? Or should we allow the same few people to have two or three contributions in short order if this leads to a deeper analysis of a particular theme or idea? Perhaps before bringing new people into a discussion the leader should check whether their comment applies to the current theme or takes the discussion on a new tack. Is it OK for the leader to call directly on individuals known to possess particular knowledge or experience that’s relevant to the theme being discussed, even if they have not indicated that they wish to speak?
One way to generate ground rules is to work from students’ most vivid recollections of their experiences as discussion participants. Here are the instructions we give to groups to do this.
Our role as teachers in this exercise is not to suggest images of how we think good discussants behave. That’s the business of group members. However, when it comes to translating these images into specific rules of conduct, we have found that students do need some help. If the class agrees that good discussions involve lots of people talking, we’ll suggest ways to make this more likely to happen, such as putting a time limit on individual contributions or regularly calling for a circle of voices where each person in turn is given the floor.
Another approach to evolving ground rules is to ask participants to focus on the “golden rule”: ask them how they would like to be spoken to in a discussion, and use their responses to frame a code of conduct for speaking to others. Again, our role would be to help students move from general declarations such as “I want people to listen carefully to what I’m saying” to specific behaviors (such as suggesting a weekly circular response discussion period in which students take turns to listen carefully, paraphrase, and then respond to each other’s contributions).
In their work on cooperative learning, Johnson, Johnson, and Smith (1991a, 1991b) emphasize that we cannot assume that students possess the social and communicative skills necessary for collaboration; these need to be taught. They propose a technique, the “T-Chart,” that can be adapted to help students develop ground rules for discussion. The characteristic of discussion that students desire is written at the top of a large piece of newsprint. Assume that students say they want their discussions to be respectful. Under the heading “Respectful,” the teacher divides the sheet in two, labeling one side “Sounds Like” and the other side “Looks Like.” Students and teachers then suggest behaviors and procedures that would fall in each column; after a few minutes, a picture emerges of how students think respectful discussions should look and sound.
Finally, you can use videos of discussion vignettes—filmed excerpts of powerfully inspiring or troublingly contentious episodes of actual discussions—as a useful way to focus students’ attention on how they want their own discussions to look. Here are the instructions for such an exercise that you might give to students.
Having participants do a serious, critical prereading of materials to prepare themselves for a discussion increases enormously the chance that you will have good conversation. However, asking students to do this purely to improve the quality of subsequent talk won’t have much effect. Students’ lives are simply too full for such a request to rise to the top of their priorities. Even those who want to do the reading will often be forced to give time to other, more pressing tasks. They’ll rely on their peers to have done the reading for them and will gamble on being able to improvise a comment or two that will make them look properly prepared.
So if you want participants to prepare for a discussion, you have to show them that it’s in their own best interests to do so. From their point of view, there has to be some incentive for them to spend time in this effort. Our approach is to ask students to write brief papers based on the prereading as part of a homework assignment. They bring multiple copies of these papers to class for sharing with peers.
Prereading works best when it is structured around a series of critical questions that preclude any clear resolution or answer. In a graduate adult education class one of us teaches, for example, the following protocol of questions has proved useful for showing students what it means to read an adult education text critically.
As teachers, we need to justify to students why we believe so strongly in using discussion. Many students will likely have experienced classes where teachers manipulated the discussion’s outcome and even humiliated their students. Being clear about what we hope to achieve through discussion helps combat students’ cynicism and raises our chances of drawing them into conversation.
We can clarify our expectations and purposes in a number of ways. For example, a strong statement as to why discussion will be used so much in class can be inserted into the syllabus. One of us includes in his course syllabus a section titled “What You Need to Know About This Course.” This section is a kind of “truth in advertising” statement that sets forth the nonnegotiable elements of the course.
You can also involve former students in communicating your expectations and purposes to new students. We like to use panels of former students as contributors to the first or second class. These former students come to class and talk about their experiences of the course a year or so previously. They are asked to pass on to new students whatever advice they have on how to survive and flourish in the class. Frequently, they end up making the case for discussion that you would have made and elaborating on the benefits that you would have stressed, but their testimony is far more powerful. Former students talking about the value of discussion have far more credibility in the eyes of new students than anything that you as the teacher could say or do.
A variant on this approach is the “letter to successors” technique. An interesting way to discover what students feel are the most crucial elements in your teaching is to ask them to identify what they regard as the essential things new students need to know and do to survive in your classroom. One of us likes to assign the writing of such a letter as an exercise at the end of a course. Current students are asked to compose a letter that will be sent to new students entering the same course the next time it is offered. The letter encapsulates departing students’ insights about the experience.
After these letters have been written, students form small discussion groups to read each other’s letters. Group members look for common themes, which are then reported in a whole-class plenary session. Because responses are given by a group reporter, anonymity is preserved, and no one is required to say anything about a particular concern unless he or she wishes to do so.
These are the instructions given for this exercise.
If one or more of these letters contain passages that urge skeptical students to prepare for discussions and to take them seriously, we try to obtain permission from the students concerned to let us reproduce these comments in the syllabus for the next version of the course.
We’ve argued in this chapter that even before a word is spoken in discussion, there’s an enormous amount that can be done to prepare students for democratic talk. Good discussions don’t just happen. They are partly the result of thoughtful planning, consistent modeling by the teacher, and respectful consideration of the experiences of students. In the next chapter we consider how such talk might be initiated once students are gathered together.