Below you will find some general considerations for leading effective discussions, some adapted from “Leading an Effective Discussion” from Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning.
Table of contents
Preparing the way
Classroom Community Agreements
Preparatory tasks
Laying the groundwork
Pass control to the students
Responding in the moment
Hybrid Discussions
The Buddy Protocol
Preparing the way
Classroom Community Agreements
Working with students at the beginning of the semester to intentionally agree community standards for respectful engagement can give you all valuable resources to draw upon as you engage in community discussions, while building trust and community and allowing students to feel heard. You can approach something like this by planning a class activity to collectively draft out a Classroom Community Agreement, working in small groups to suggest principles to adhere to before agreeing to a final list as a class. There are some principles that you might consider suggesting if they do not come up organically, such as these:
- Assume good will.
- We all have responsibility for the quality of the discussion.
- We are here to understand, not to convince.
- Speak for yourself, not others.
- Practice confidentiality when it comes to personal stories or statements.
Creating Community Agreements with Your Students from Boston University Center for Teaching & Learning offers some guidelines as to how to approach such activities.
Preparatory tasks
All of us have more to say when we are prepared, and you can help students to activate their knowledge and formulate some first ideas by assigning preparatory tasks ahead of a discussion. Some examples of preparatory tasks are as follows:
- Submitting a written response to a discussion prompt or questions, either as a Moodle assignment or a Moodle discussion forum; if you favor a low-tech solution, one option can be to have the students prepare responses as handwritten notecards. This can be assigned to students in the days before a discussion, or as a short priming activity at the beginning of class.
- Sharing initial ideas in collaborative spaces like Google Docs or Google Slides. You can prompt students to gather relevant images, links to news stories or other resources, and so deepen understanding of the scope of a topic for the entire class.
- Annotating a reading, on a physical copy or a social annotation platform like Perusall, and coming to class prepared with three questions about the material. It can be helpful to give students time to look back over these notes at the beginning of class.
Additionally, you can scaffold student engagement in discussions by inviting students to begin discussing the ideas or materials in pairs or small groups, before feeding back some of their responses in a whole-class conversation. This gives students an opportunity to remind themselves of the content and to practice speaking their responses aloud in a lower-pressure scenario before speaking in front of the whole class. Think-pair-share is a classic classroom technique in which the instructor prompts students to think about and write down their answers to a question, and then pair up to discuss them. A nice variant on this is Pairs and Pods, a method in which students are asked to first share their responses to some topic in a pair with another student, and then in a pod of four students (two pairs put together). Students maintain the same pair and pod across a few classes, so that they build community within their group; students have time to prepare and then share their thoughts with iteratively larger groups, which provides a scaffold toward speaking in bigger discussions.
Laying the groundwork
It can be worth considering what you need to say at the beginning of a class to give students a clear understanding of the purpose of the discussion and the main points and skills that you want them to take away from it.
A key principle of Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) is that of promoting students’ conscious understanding of how they learn and how higher education works, and you can put that into practice here by talking to students at the beginning of a discussion about what you hope to accomplish, the skills you want them to practice, and up to three main points you want to address.
It can also be helpful to begin by defining some key terms you will be using, establishing some baseline knowledge that will inform the discussion, or working with students to establish standards of evidence for claims made in the discussion.
Pass control to the students
If you want to encourage students to take control and to learn to look to one another for feedback, you can consider using a rotating chair format, turning your focus to documenting what is said in notes on the board, or explicitly establishing ahead of time that you will be taking an observer role in a particular discussion.
Responding in the moment
“Leading an Effective Discussion” from Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning suggests some strategies to use when a student makes an off-target comment:
- Even if the comment is completely wrong or “off the wall,” thank the student for sharing their idea and—this is your creative challenge of the day—find a way to link their concept back to the discussion.
- A repertoire of encouraging comments is useful here. “Thank you for those thoughts on the matter. If you were to approach the concept from a slightly different angle, you might see that…” or, “I’m glad you brought up that idea. It reminds me that one of our concerns here is actually…” or, “With a bit more development, we could turn that idea around to make the point that…”
- After class, take time to talk with the student who made the erroneous comment and discuss the issue with him or her then. This will reinforce that you want people to take risks with their ideas in class, but that you are also committed to helping your students understand the material correctly.
At times, discussions can get heated and challenging topics can arise. What are some principles to keep in mind when covering difficult topics in the classroom? offers some general recommendations for managing challenging topics, and the section Managing ‘hot moments’ offers some strategies to use for tough moments in the classroom.
Hybrid discussions
It can be tricky to run a discussion with participants attending both in person and on Zoom, but many of our classrooms are set up to accommodate them in a way that is genuinely interactive and engaged for all participants.
Some of our classrooms have microphones and webcams installed on the podiums, and it will be up to the instructor to orient the microphone and camera toward whoever is speaking. In some cases, when a participant in the room is softly-spoken or seated far from the microphone, it can be helpful to repeat what has been said to be sure that remote participants can hear it.
Other classrooms are equipped with ceiling-mounted cameras with ceiling mic arrays that can pick up audio from anywhere in the room. You can check what equipment is available in a particular classroom by looking up the room’s listing in EMS Room Scheduling and consulting the ‘Features’ tab.
It can be beneficial to have Zoom running on a monitor with the audio coming through the speakers, such that remote participants can be seen and heard by those attending in person. Rooms with more than one display will often allow you to show different things on different displays (for example, slides on one display and Zoom on another) by choosing ‘Advanced’ setup.
To read more about the equipment found in different classrooms and instructions for working with them, consult our Podium Setup Instructions page.
The Buddy Protocol
One way to share responsibility for managing hybrid discussions is to employ the Buddy Protocol. In this method, each remote participant is paired up with a student who is attending in person, who then takes responsibility for Zooming them in from their own laptop. This can be particularly helpful when you are planning discussions with small-group components where the class will be in breakout groups for a while and you want remote participants to be part of those groups. You can read more about this method, and access templates for documents you can share with the students ahead of time to prepare them, in the article Wondering how to accommodate remote learners into your face to face classroom this fall? Try the “Buddy” Protocol.
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Interested in thinking more about ways to make your discussions optimally effective? Reach out to us at edtech@pacificu.edu, and we can suggest more resources or schedule a one-on-one.
We are also always looking for more answers to this question, so if you have one that’s worked for you, please let us know!