Tip: Student-Led Discussions
Tip: Student-Led Discussions
Engaging and meaningful class discussions can be excellent learning opportunities, but they can also be exhausting to facilitate.
Two weeks ago I shared six techniques for asking better questions of students. This week I am flipping the focus to helping students learn to ask better questions. Engaging and meaningful class discussions can be excellent learning opportunities, but they can also be exhausting to facilitate. Students need to be prepared to take on some of the work of facilitating discussion, and this preparation includes explicit attention to different types of questions, and practice drafting questions. The more transparent we can be about how to facilitate discussions, the better students will become at taking on the responsibility for keeping a discussion moving.
Questions for Facilitating Discussion
Introducing students to different types of questions, and how different questions get at different types of responses, helps them to see connections between what they ask and the direction they would like to guide the discussion. Below is a list of question types with some examples.
Reaction/personal perspective: What were your reactions to this week’s reading? What did you learn from reading the articles this week?
Information-seeking: What is the function of a cell wall? What types of evidence does the author use?
Challenge: Why should anyone care about these results? What’s another way to look at this scenario? If you had to argue the opposite opinion, what would you say?
Call to action: What can we do to convince voters to take issue X seriously? How would you explain the importance of X to the college president?
Priority/rank and sequence: What is the first issue that should be addressed? How would you rank these issues?
Prediction: If we offer two years of free community college to all students, what impacts might we expect to see on student persistence?
Inferences: What do the results of the experiment suggest? What do you think the author would say on this topic?
This list was in part adapted from a list shared by Seth Matthew Fishman, Villanova University.
Introducing students to different types of questions, and providing them with opportunities to come up with questions, will help them to take ownership over guiding discussions in productive ways.
For more reading:
The Harvard Business school page, Teaching by the Case Method: Questioning, Listening & Responding has an excellent overview and list of supplemental resources.
Thanks for this. In my online classes, I do ask students to ask (and answer) questions. Both information seeking and personal perspective. Often their questions are rather lame. Some students tend to ask "test type" questions. Others ask questions that can be answered with just a "yes" or "no".
I provide a resource for my students to help them better understand what constitutes good question asking: https://www.nvcc.edu/home/lshulman/learning/deepthinking.htm But I am afraid few of my students actually read these resources.