Getting Ready To Try Student-Led Discussions

This post is dedicated to John Dings (1939--2014), 

who was my teacher and friend for many years.

If you want to start using Student-Led Discussions, you'll need time, practice, discussion-worthy texts, and active readers.

TIME

Student-Led Discussion (SLD) techniques take lots of time. I'm not sure it's possible to have a quick SLD. I recommend 30-minute sessions, at the very least (you need to build in time for the awkward silences I mention below). And don't expect students to master these techniques until you've spent many such sessions on them. Eventually, you may want your SLDs to last for an hour or so, if the length of your class-period allows. If a text is worth talking about (more about that below), then it's worth talking about at length.

Trying out SLDs once or twice, or just now and then, would be counterproductive, a waste of time. You'd never see any real results. Sustained practice is required. SLDs are a long-term commitment, and I don't see any way around that. I also don't see that as a drawback. In the Humanities, at least, intellectual conversation is our bread and butter. It's what we do. It follows reading and precedes writing; ideally, it's all part of a connected learning process.

PRACTICE

As the students learn to function without your constant guidance, without your continual questioning, they will falter and fail. You'll have to sit through some awkward silences, but the more you restrain yourself here, the better the results will be in the end. 

If you rescue the students from their silence even once, they'll rely on you to do it again, and then you'll find yourself playing a waiting-game of who's-gonna-crack-first? When the silence gets really unbearable, I just smile and say, calmly but cheerfully, "I can wait all day!"

Before these early sessions, it's good to chat with the students to find out if they feel ready (I address specific preparation strategies below), if they're worried or scared. Some anxiety is natural; learning to conquer it is important. 

Likewise, after the early SLDs, it's helpful to process each session a bit. Save 5-10 minutes for this and ask them what went well, what didn't work, what they learned about how to prepare more effectively next time. Give them a few of your thoughts about how they did, but don't overwhelm them with too much feedback at first. 

Find out if they actually used all the advice you gave them about preparing for discussion! Sometimes, my students don't take my advice until I prove to them, repeatedly, through their own dismal experience, that it's actually good advice.

Know that the road to mastery is neither swift, nor smooth, nor linear! But the journey, with all its twists and turns, all its high- and low-points, is where all the learning happens!

DISCUSSION-WORTHY TEXTS

Make sure you're assigning discussion-worthy texts. Don't try SLDs with something short and simple. If the text in question isn't complex and interesting to the students, then they'll run out of things to say pretty quickly, especially when they're in the early stages of learning these techniques. 

Give them something challenging--you want them to puzzle through the difficulties together, and a certain degree of confusion gives rise to authentic questions. So start with something rich and meaty, and then make sure each successive text is even more challenging. Rich texts will challenge the students on the level of vocabulary, sentence structure, narrative structure; ambiguity, controversy, relevance, and unusual perspectives are conversation-makers. 

Discussion-worthy texts get kids thinking across disciplinary lines, and you want them making connections, bringing everything they've ever learned to bear upon those texts. Not everything you ask them to read needs to be covered in a SLD.

ACTIVE READERS

Above all, SLDs require students to be active readers. If your students are passive or reluctant readers, SLDs can turn them around somewhat, but don't expect the process to be instantaneous (remember, it takes time and practice.) And here's where advance preparation comes in. 

• Question-Formation Tools

I generally try to stay away from giving students study questions in advance of the reading. I think it's much more valuable to have them formulating questions for themselves, as they read. Only with the most complex or potentially overwhelming texts do I give study questions, and then I rely upon such questions (which tend to be lengthy, full of historical background, literary terminology, or relevant biographical information), to take the place of a lecture.

So rather than giving students questions in advance, I try to teach them how to ask good questions. It's easy to find lots of advice about leading discussions by formulating good questions. Even if such advice is written for teachers, it's really meant for those who are leading discussions, and in this case, that's your students! 

I've also found it effective to give students a list of question stems which provide students with question-templates they can use with almost any text. As students get into the habit of formulating questions while they read, they become better readers (and better thinkers, and better conversationalists).

• Pre-Discussion Assessments (Indirect Instruction)

The discussion itself shouldn't be the only way you assess the students' mastery of the text. I'm fond of rotating through a number of pre-discussion assessments: each class period, the students know they should expect either a quiz, or a journal-check, or a short in-class writing assignment, or a video-response question (à la Flipgrid.com). These assessments help hold the students accountable for doing their reading, and it gets them in the habit of thinking about the reading before they get to class. If they know they'll be held accountable for reading, that they'll have to prove in some way that they read, then they're more likely to read with their brains more fully engaged.

These assessments also give me ways to frame the upcoming discussion through indirect direct instruction. Whether students realize it or not, the questions on a quiz indicate what I think is important in the day's reading; likewise, a writing/Flipgrid prompt lets me direct the students' reflection before they begin to speak. 

Student-centered teaching doesn't require me to relinquish my role as instructor; it just means that more of my direct instruction is indirect. And because I don't offer much direct instruction at all, what I do provide, through these assessments, carries a bit more weight than it might otherwise. This is one of the benefits of my silence, which I wrote about earlier.

(This way of thinking about assessments as indirect but powerful teaching tools is something I learned long ago from one of my most important mentors, John Dings, who died a few months ago and to whom this post is dedicated.)

I mentioned reading journals; I generally use a progression of styles. I start with simple double-entry journals, in which students build up a collection of quotations and reflect briefly on their significance. Text-based SLDs need to reference the text frequently, and this kind of journal gets the students in the habit of weaving the text into their conversations.

Later on, the students write a one-page reflection on what I call a "synecdochic quotation," a passage that, all by itself, represents a larger theme or message in the text as a whole (or at least as much of the text as we've read so far). The students must find these passages on their own and explain how they contain or illuminate a meaning that reaches beyond their immediate context. Thus, we move from fragmented observations to more sustained and connected thinking. (Teaching students to identify a part of the text and show how it contains the whole is yet another method I borrowed from John...)

When I begin to use SLDs, I check the students' journals quite frequently; as time goes on and they come to rely on their journals to help them during the discussions, I can check them a bit less often.

Any kind of pre-discussion writing can serve intermittently as a kind of script during the conversation, and this can be a great help to quieter students. I allow them to read directly from their journals, if that's what it takes to get them participating. Because their journals are digital, the students have their laptops open during discussions. (I'll say more about how I integrate technology into SLDs in another post.)

• Pre-Reading Research

With some texts, especially those that rely on specialized background knowledge, I have students do research projects (usually in groups, with the results of the research shared in presentations) before we read the text in question. I won't describe these projects here and now, but I choose the topics. When we read Flight, for instance, by Sherman Alexie, I have the students research the Ghost Dance, The Battle of Little Bighorn, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the Pine Ridge shootout. Without some knowledge of these subjects, the students would be at a loss, and while I could lecture about these subjects, it's better for the students to learn about them by researching them and then teaching their peers what they learned. This information, which they feel they "own," because they actively researched it, then gets woven into their discussions, usually without me even having to prompt them for it.

• Post-Discussion Assessments

Obviously, with the use of various post-discussion assessments (paper topics, reflective blogging prompts, test- and exam-questions), I can continue to frame the students' thinking about the text. I won't say much here except that, as I do more and more SLDs, the more I find myself building these assessments on ideas that arise from the students' conversations. As I listen to and assess the SLDs, I am busy jotting down notes for future assessments. I actually get lots of ideas from the students themselves! That's when I know we've had a really great discussion, because I end up with lots of hastily scrawled notes about exam questions, paper topics, and project ideas. When the students teach the teacher, then the students are truly reading actively!

Please let me know what you think in the comments!