facilitating effective classroom discussions

Finding the Discussion Question That Works

I’ve been teaching literature for more than 30 years, and nothing has struck me more during that time than the difficulty of finding just the right discussion question. It’s easy to give out information, which students dutifully take down in notebooks and throw away after

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class discussion

How Good Are Your Discussion Facilitation Skills?

Successfully leading and guiding student discussions requires a range of fairly sophisticated communication skills. At the same time teachers are monitoring what’s being said about the content, they must keep track of the discussion itself. Is it on topic? How many students want to speak?

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student engagement

Classroom Discussions: How to Apply the Right Amount of Structure

While preparing for a Teaching Professor Conference session on facilitating classroom discussions (much of which applies to online exchanges), I’ve been reminded yet again of the complexity involved in leading a discussion with students new to the content and unfamiliar with academic discourse. hile preparing

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University students study in classroom with female lecturer

Facilitation Skills: The Way to Better Student Discussions

Most faculty aspire to engage and involve students in interesting and insightful discussions. But these in-class and online exchanges frequently disappoint faculty. Students come to them unprepared. They engage reluctantly. Their individual and unrelated comments take the discussion in different directions. There can be awkward

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classroom discussion

Influencing How Students Discuss Content

When students are talking with each other about content, most of us worry, at least a little bit. We’ve all heard less-than-impressive exchanges. For example, four students are in a group discussing three open-ended questions about two challenging readings. It’s less than five minutes since

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calling on a student

Nine Ways to Improve Class Discussions

I once heard class discussions described as “transient instructional events.” They pass through the class, the course, and the educational experiences of students with few lingering effects. Ideas are batted around, often with forced participation; students don’t take notes; and then the discussion ends—it runs

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The Relationship between Participation and Discussion

My interest in participation and discussion continues. How do we use them so that they more effectively promote engagement and learning? A couple of colleagues and I have been working on a paper that deals with how we define participation and discussion.

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You Got Students Talking about Their Experiences, Now What?

“Get students talking about their experiences!” I heard this recommendation in a couple of sessions at the recent Teaching Professor Technology Conference, and the admonition does rest on sound premises. Students learn new material by connecting it to what they already know. If

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I’ve been teaching literature for more than 30 years, and nothing has struck me more during that time than the difficulty of finding just the right discussion question. It’s easy to give out information, which students dutifully take down in notebooks and throw away after the test. It’s not even that hard to do a kind of modified Socratic dialogue, in which you stand in the middle of the classroom and elicit one- or two-sentence responses (you pretty much know these responses beforehand) from select, eager students that you continually call on.

But these are not discussions. Discussions are freewheeling, bothersome, hard-to-predict, time-consuming animals that a great many teachers don’t like. Real discussions don’t always fit with what’s in the syllabus or planned for class—they just grow, evolve, get out of hand, and sometimes mutate.

Frequently you can’t even get them started. And you aren’t helped very much by textbooks suggestions. “Analyze Hamlet as an individual.” “Are there people like Ophelia in your dorm?” “Why aren’t they popular?” (I’m not kidding; I’ve seen these suggestions in print.)

There are questions, though, that work. They initiate actual, text-related argument. They energize students. They work on all students, not just the ones who know they need to discuss in order to impress the teacher. Every experienced teaching who truly likes discussion collects these questions. There are a great many of them out there, and I would love to hear other suggestions. Here, though, is my all time favorite: “Was Oedipus guilty?”

Five-minute wait. Finally, a student in the back with the baseball cap on backwards. “No. He’s fated to do it. I mean, like, to marry his mother and kill his father. The gods make him do it.” After only a one-minute wait, a female student up front responds, “Yeah but—he really does kill these people. And he’s stupid for marrying a woman that much older than he is.” From someplace else: “She’s still good-looking though.” Laughter. “I mean—he’s guilty because he’s crazy. He’s gonna kill the blind guy—what’s his name?” “Teiresias.” “Yeah, that.” Laughter again.

“He’s gonna kill that guy. And it doesn’t make any sense because he’s supposed to be smart.” Someone else. “But he’s not guilty because everything he does, he wants it to help people. He’s trying to help the Thebes people, even to find the killer in the first place.”

And so it continues for the entire class period (or maybe a lifetime, or even a millennium). You can make a trial scene out of it, with robed judge, district attorney, and defense counsel. You can have a jury. If that all seems too informal for the halls of academe, don’t do it that way. But any way you do it, the discussion will get livelier and livelier (as long as you let it breathe and don’t lead it too quickly where you want it to go—remember you don’t know where it’s going)—until it gets right to the heart of all that matters. It will lead to questions of divine omniscience, fate, predetermination, and even modern heroism in the face of disillusioning truths. And it will lead to more of those questions that make discussions happen!


This article originally appeared in the March 2005 print issue of The Teaching Professor. For more on this topic, see our spring 2021 special feature on the questions teachers ask students.