This past week’s focus in 388V has been on facilitating effective discussions, both in-person and online. Your UTAs read and watched the following:
- Napell’s Six Common Non-facilitating Behaviors. Napell’s 1976 article could have been written yesterday. In it, she explains why students fall silent in the face of ineffective questioning strategies, including “rapid rewards,” insufficient wait time, and more. Your UTAs have experienced all of these problems in previous classes.
- Boettcher’s “Power Questioning Strategies for more Meaningful Discussions”. Geared towards online discussions, her strategies are just as applicable for in-person discussions. Your UTAs particularly like her “Know/ Want/ Learn” and “Dream Initiative” strategies.
- Thompson’s “Strategies for Student Centered Discussion,” a fantastic example of a well-facilitated, student-led discussion. Thompson explains her key moves at several stages of this six-minute video. Your students especially liked what she does immediately: ask a guiding question and give students time to take notes for a minute to launch their discussion.
In class, we addressed what to do when students are unengaged or unwilling to participate in discussions. These represent some of the most soul-crushing teaching moments for many of us and your UTAs. We discussed cold-calling: why so many of us are (justifiably) reluctant to do it and how to do it well. We touched on questioning strategies (see Nilson, attached) and will return to it next week. Next week we will also discuss the most important ingredient of all: explaining to students why we value discussion.
Students don’t necessarily know why they’ll benefit from participating in discussions without our guidance. They don’t know what we mean by discussion in our classes, as discussions look different to each of us (and all of their other professors). And they certainly don’t know what we expect from them if we don’t tell them (or, ideally, negotiate expectations with them). What they do know: if a handful of their peers are willing to respond to most of our questions, they’re off the hook for the entirety of the semester. And that makes it even harder for your UTAs to feel comfortable in front of class.
I invite you to read the resources linked above as well as this great source I just stumbled upon from CMU’s Eberly Center: what to do when students don’t participate in discussions. For those of you who like reading books on teaching, I recommend Brookfield’s and Preskill’s classic: Discussion as a Way of Teaching (2005), Howard’s Discussion in the College Classroom (2015), and Herman’s and Nilson’s recent Creating Engaging Discussions (2018).
If you have additional resources or tips to share, please let me know!