Using Class Discussion to Meet Your Teaching Goals (Part 2)

Using Class Discussion to Meet Your Teaching Goals (Part 2)

Trouble-Shooting

When students are not already heavily invested in a field, even important exercises can lack intrinsic interest. If students' participation is lackluster, it can help to have a basic discussion about what makes your field and its approaches unique. An instructor's enthusiasm for his or her field is probably the single biggest influence on whether students find it equally compelling. By focusing on the big picture, you may be able to interest students in the smaller details. You can also connect what students are doing to the activities of scholars or professionals or those in your field. Students often don't understand how skills learned in introductory, or even advanced, classes relate to the kinds of original scholarship or careers that they are interested in.

Develop Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is an important goal in most fields, whether it is used to analyze the logic of a philosopher or to find the potential problems with a proposed healthcare initiative. Discussion is an excellent tool for developing students' reasoning skills because it gives you access to their thought processes and an opportunity to guide students to a higher level of thinking.

Prompts and Exercises

Critical thinking can be applied to any text, claim, or open-ended question. Choose topics that are likely to provoke student interest but not necessarily topics that students already have strong and passionate opinions about. To teach critical thinking, you need a window of open-mindedness and curiosity.

Stir up controversy.

Provide students with a provocative or controversial quote from some expert in your field (possibly a guest lecturer or the author of a class text). Use the expert's claim as a challenge to students: Is this expert right? How would you decide? What information do you need? What information do you have? Payne and Gainey (2003) have developed a list of controversial claims in many fields, from marketing to medicine, that may be useful for your course.

Provide alternatives.

Give your students two competing claims, conflicting theories, or any set of alternative options. Instead of taking a vote, or asking students to immediately choose a side, start with a question that encourages open thinking. What is the issue here? or What is this really a choice between? can launch a deeper conversation than Which do you agree with? Ask students to describe the perspectives that inform each alternative and critically discuss those perspectives as much as the actual claims.

Guiding Discussion

Make sure students understand that discussion is not simply an invitation to restate their opinions. Remind them: The goal of critical thinking is to examine your own assumptions and evidence, not just to criticize the thinking of others who disagree with you!

Focus your attention on the quality of students' reasoning, not just the content of their reasoning. Instructors need to be able to recognize both common errors in reasoning (such as making unsupported assertions and using anecdotal evidence) and the signs of high-level reasoning (such as focusing on empirical evidence for a theory and the ability to integrate personal values with evidence). Greenlaw and DeLoach (2003) suggest that instructors spend time reflecting on what different levels of reasoning look like in their respective fields. What are the most common forms of uncritical thinking in your field? What is the gold standard for critical thinking applied to your field?

A discussion leader can then focus on guiding students from common reasoning errors or simplistic reasoning to more complex or high-level reasoning. When students make a claim, ask them for their evidence or logic. Then ask the class to evaluate the evidence or logic. Encourage students who disagree on a point to identify the source of the disagreement (i.e., trusting different kinds of evidence or weighing certain values more strongly) rather than simply the point of disagreement.

Encourage students to talk to each other, not just to you. Keep your own contributions content-neutral. Don't take a stance; simply probe students' thinking. If necessary, ask a student to play the devil's advocate role, rather than playing it yourself.

Encouraging Participation

Encourage listening as much as talking. Students often concentrate so hard on what they are going to say, and how to score points, that they fail to really listen to others (Hollander, 2002). To help students develop their listening skills, encourage them to repeat the last important point and then respond directly to it (rather than stating a new opinion). Encourage students to keep building on a particular argument or interpretation. Make sure that you reinforce all forms of helpful contributions such as asking good questions or connecting points that other students have made.

Students rise to the occasion when their peers demonstrate a high level of reasoning (DeLoach and Greenlaw, 2005). When critical thinking is the goal of discussion, it can be helpful to focus first on the "high contributors" in the class, rather than trying to equalize participation among all students. Encourage students who make high-quality contributions and acknowledge what made the contribution useful. Once a norm is established, other students will be more likely to maintain the high standard of discussion. If a few students monopolize the discussion, you can invite others to comment or break the class into smaller discussion groups.

If you have a hard time starting discussions with your class, ask students to rate their agreement with a claim on a scale of 1-5. Then ask them to write down five reasons that they agree or disagree with the claim. A student with a 2 rating writes two reasons that the claim is compelling and three reasons that the claim is not compelling; a student with a 5 rating needs to come up with five reasons that support the claim. This guarantees that students will have something to say and acknowledges thoughtful ambivalence as an appropriate position.

- UO Teaching Effectiveness Program