“Please summarize the story for the class.”
Silence.
“What’s the theme of this text?”
Crickets chirping.
“Is the main character reliable?”
A pin drops.
These are the responses, or lack thereof, I get when I attempted to have my sophomore classes discuss a text; a few times this semester, my CT has been absent and I have worked a discussion into my lesson plans, only to have it blow up in my face. Before class begins, I envision a perfect dialectic discussion in which students not only share their ideas, but clarify and analyze their classmates’ responses. Unfortunately, that’s not at all the way it actually happened.
This is my fault. My students are not having productive a discussion and it’s completely my fault. What can I do to fix this?
In his article, “Tom Sawyer, Teaching, and Talking,” Robert E. Probst addresses ideas such as having better discussions in the classroom, increasing the quality of student questions, and improving student listening. After reading this article, I developed some of my own strategies that I will use in my student teaching and next year when I have my own classroom to have more effective classroom discussions.
1. The Question Box. This strategy is something I thought of when answering my own questions for seminar last week (I was the Discussion Director). After reading a text, students will be asked to write one question they have about the text; it can be anything about a character, setting, plot, or even the author. After they write their question, they place it a physical box, called The Question Box. Depending on the class, I may or may not ask students to put their names on their questions. The following class period, I will pull out the questions, read them to the class, and ask students to respond to them. After discussion is exhausted for each question, I will ask students if the question produced a good discussion. If they say yes, I will ask them why and if they say no, I will ask them how the question could be improved. This will get students thinking about their questions and eventually they will write more effective questions and have better discussions.
2. Summarize/clarify. During classroom discussions, after a student has finished his or her response, I will randomly select another student to either summarize or clarify for the rest of the class what the initial student said before moving forward in the discussion. This will greatly improve student listening skills, as they will never know when they will be selected to summarize or clarify.
3. Advance discussion questions. When I have a classroom discussion planned, I will prepare a list of questions, give them to students, and inform them that they will have a discussion and must have answers prepared. Giving the questions to students in advance and allowing them to develop answers will increase the quality of classroom discussions, as it allows to students to thoroughly think about something and write a response before vocalizing it in class.
I’m sure I will add to this list later as I think of more ideas. What are some strategies you use to increase the quality of student discussions? I am looking forward to reading your ideas! Thanks for reading.
References
Probst, R.E. Tom Sawyer, teaching, and talking. In Beers, K., Probst, R.E., & Rief, L. Eds. (2007) Adolescent literacy: Turning promise into practice (pp. 43-60). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
