Discussion Classes:
Faculty Thoughts & Student ScriptsIn the Easter Semester, 2003, the Center for Teaching held a series of sessions on class discussion. I've compiled the reflections and reports below.
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Dear Colleagues,
To prepare for the ‘teaching lunch' next Thursday, I'm eager to hear how you use discussion and any concerns and reflections you have about the technique.
I should say “no need to compose a careful response” and throw in a typo to make my point, but then as academics we don't easily allow ourselves such freedom. Still, on the chance that you're feeling spontaneous, let me assure you that anything I share with others will be anonymous and even then, if I use your actual words, I'll get your approval first.
If you have a moment, I've written up some preliminary thoughts to stimulate discussion. If not, any off-the-cuff reply would be helpful
Richard
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All the teaching manuals have separate sections for lecture and discussion. That's also what I hear: it's a lecture or discussion class, a binary distinction. What's odd, then, is that our actual practices are all over the map. When Sherwood Eby studied our teaching back in 1999, he found an enormous variety of practices. Using 60 possible descriptors, he found 58 in use in Sewanee classrooms during a single week. Lecturing was the largest single slice (22.8% of the teaching minutes), but that already lumped together three different styles. Sherwood concluded that the idea that “Sewanee professors mostly lecture” was a myth.
What feeds the myth? College teaching is in flux. Two generations ago, the lecture held sway. Today, a wide variety of teaching techniques fill the classroom. Caught in this sea change, Sewanee and perhaps many colleges may see themselves as more traditional than they actually are. Why? That's how the politics of reform and resistance works. It's how we have learned to see and criticize ourselves. It's not, however, what Sherwood found or I've encountered.
What's striking is the gross inadequacy of current concepts. That simple distinction—lecture or discussion—is too simple for how we teach and our students learn. For years I took my awkward efforts at discussion as proof that I was the world's worst lecturer. Then at the ACS Teaching Workshop I learned that I had a unique style that aimed at something else altogether. When I discover what that is, you and my students will be the first to know! For now, however, the point is that I was trying to fit my teaching into a lecture-or-discussion mold that didn't fit what I had worked out with my students over the years.
I'm not alone in this confusion. When I surveyed three sections of introductory anthropology, using a few open-ended questions, I discovered conflicting norms. I'll write up these student findings separately, but it's clear that many difficulties with discussion come from mixed signals and contradictory expectations.
What causes our confusion? If you follow larger intellectual currents, the move away from the single authoritative voice of the lecture (the grand narrative!) to the many voices of discussion (pluralism!) would look like a modern-to-postmodern shift. That's a bit too grand and far too political for me, at least if it adds saving Western civilization to our other burdens as teachers, but we can hardly ignore how epistemological and societal changes have in fact altered classroom conditions.
In facing these changes most faculty appear to be pragmatists caught between conflicting realities. One reality is that keeping up with a discipline competes against the time it takes to teach it. The other reality is that our society schools students to be skeptical consumers, not trusting disciples. Struggling to mediate between these two fluid realities, faculty who simply do what works in the classroom may find themselves moving away from straightforward lecturing in spite of their plans. Although a good lecture can still convey knowledge elegantly, today's students value how a good discussion can generate involvement naturally. Then, too, were the classroom's practical politics our only guide, we'd find lecturing claims an authority that's increasingly hard to hold. Discussion, on the other hand, is an effective strategy for engaging students.
The catch, of course, is that teaching demands both authority and engagement: without authority we have nothing to teach but without engaged students our teaching doesn't matter. No doubt there is a score of further paradoxes here, but the last catch--the twenty-second one--is that all plans collapse in the classroom where our students still hold half the cards. We can design the game, but if they won't play, fifty minutes can last a lifetime.
Now that I've wandered about within this subject, you can see why I'm a horrible lecturer. While some of you issue a recall notice for my former students, I invite the rest of you to send me your thoughts on discussion.
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Center for Teaching
February 28, 2003Faculty Comments on Class Discussion
I've had several thoughtful and helpful replies to my two earlier e-mails on the topic of class discussion. To encourage off-the-cuff replies, I've decided to keep responses to my queries anonymous and edit out specifics that identify the teacher or the course. I realize that's not a perfect solution—it doesn't give credit where credit is due—but I can't think of a better way to do this and still ‘free up' discussion. Anyway, even if it is anonymous, thanks to the following for offering their reflections and helping out their colleagues.
#1: [In response to my “Class Discussions & Student Scripts”]: It reminded me of some things I need to keep in mind (Keep that "accepting look on my face and cover the frustration that surfaces when a student has really headed off track...or when I am trying to think of a nice thing to reply to a student that has given an answer from a different galaxy) and reinforced my hunch that discussion needs a good leader (who nudges but doesn't appear to dominate the direction of the discussion) and some focus for the students (perhaps some ideas to consider before the discussion begins...specific questions to help those students who are uncomfortable sharing ideas that have just come to mind...but might be willing to share thoughts they had some time to prepare). The students need to feel they have learned something at the end of the discussion and that reminds me to have some type of summary mechanism planned. And that using a variety of approaches...from discussion to lecture...is needed to reach all of the students. As you said " We can't, then, please all of our students all of the time. ", because they have different learning styles.
#2 I have never done well with free-form discussions. The best discussions are those in which the students are tricked to delivering your lecture for you. But you have to be careful: they all justifiably hate that "see if you can guess what I'm thinking" trick. What's worked well for me is to have some, or all, of the students prepare a focused response to a question for the next class. So I might pick on four of my upper level students and tell them to be ready to say something about a particular passage . . .. For this Wednesday's class, all of my freshmen have to think about "lines of conflict" in [a particular text]; they also have to notice who does most of the talking . . . and keep track of . . . imagery. I hope that a focused and high-level discussion about character will emerge from all this.
This is not something they have to submit in writing, but writing also works incredibly well to prime the pump. I find that I am less likely to do in-class writing than I used to be and more likely to have them prepare a little something in advance (say, a one-page response paper). The quality of the writing and discussion is much higher (in fact, in one of my more Machiavellian moments in grad school, I assigned just such a short paper, due on the day I was to be observed . . . ).
#3 I don't have a theoretical basis for my teaching methods, though it would probably be a good idea. My classes are 75% discussion, 25% lecture because I am more comfortable discussing literature than I am lecturing to a class of blank faces. It's important for me to know whether or not they are engaged with the material, and testing is not a successful way to discover this, at least for me. I also find that I tend to learn more in classroom discussions from my students' insights (and they do have them) than if I am lecturing on the material.
The course set up is usually thus: I frame the course for them, introduce the material (for each new text), provide the necessary background, and outline the major themes we will address. Discussions take three forms:
1) Small discussion groups: I assign them sections of the text and break them up into small discussion groups. Each group is responsible for a question about the text or a close reading of a passage that deals with one of the themes I've already outlined. They take notes and create a written summary of their small group discussion. The next class period each group (a spokesperson or each member) shares its summary with the rest of the class, initiating discussion on that subject. After each group has presented their findings, we usually have covered what we need to cover for that day. If not, we finish in the next class. The advantage of this is that it gets quieter students involved in discussion, but they do not have to speak in front of the whole class.
2) Response papers: the students write individual response papers on different topics and I divide up the classroom discussion according to the response papers topics; a student who as written a response paper leads the discussion on that topic (not every student writes a response paper for every text we read).
3) Formal presentations: Groups of students are also responsible for major presentations which involve research and outside material, which they then present to the class in a formal manner. I meet with each group a week before the presentation to outline my expectations and provide them with sources and suggestions.
I lecture when I need them to understand a theoretical concept which will be relevant to their understanding of the text, or when I want to make connections between texts. Even then, I expect and invite responses and questions.
For me, learning is a conversation. When I do lecture, it's usually to provide them with a model of analysis and examination, which they might follow, but I'll also admit that I'm uncomfortable with the idea of speaking for 55 minutes.
#4: Some thoughts on classroom discussion as a form of learning:
Effective teaching strategies include active participation and more frequently than not the activity is that of discussion. This method of instruction, while very effective if used appropriately, is laden with pitfalls for the teacher who is unfamiliar with “discussion as a learning strategy” For example: Brainstorming is a form of discussion where the objective is to do a form of Q-sort to establish priorities. This process is often used in strategic planning and is the first of several such sessions. Outside of brainstorming the teacher or professor must have an “instructional objective” that becomes the roadmap for discussion. In the absence of this roadmap many classrooms become ‘ramblings' that are off topic that lead to …………..
Therefore, to make discussions an effective form of teaching we must begin with the concept that active participation increases learning, and discussion is a form of active participation. However with this premise we must embrace the axiom: The greatest predictor of academic success is engaged learning time . A class discussion is not an exception to this axiom and it becomes the professor's responsibility to guard against the pitfall of letting discussions become “a free meandering brook.”
Using the aforementioned concepts, it is important that a professor understand the taxonomy of learning allowing discussion to naturally flow from each level. For example, if the class is functioning at the knowledge level of the taxonomy, cooperative learning groups would be a good basic form of discussion. It is important that knowledge precede the other steps in the taxonomy (often referred to as knowledge and procedural learning). One of the greatest errors made by leaders of discussions is the participants do not have knowledge and the teacher is trying to lead a discussion with concept analysis as the instructional goal. In this scenario, when productive discussion does not occur, the professor raises the question about “discussion techniques' when, in essence, the level of instruction is not where the students are functioning.
Once the learning moves from the knowledge level to comprehension or application, discussion groups would take on more of a questioning, inquiry format. To me, personally, the most exciting of the discussion techniques is the Socratic Seminar. The seminar is usually directed by a student with the professor acting as mentor and facilitator. Student learning in the Socratic Seminar is usually at the analysis, synthesis, and evaluation level. These seminars are exciting, student learning soars, and the professor can enjoy in depth discussions that are on task and productive.
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Center for Teaching
February 25, 2003Class Discussions and Student Scripts
To explore discussion from the student side, I asked three sections of my colleagues' introductory anthropology classes to write responses to three open-ended questions:
• Think of the best discussion-oriented course you've had. What made it good?• Think of the worst discussion-oriented course you've had. What made it bad?
• What's your opinion of discussion-oriented approaches as opposed to other ways of holding class?
Out of the 62 responses, women were over represented (45 women / 17 men) as were underclassmen (31 freshmen; 16 sophomores), but the respondents divided nearly evenly between public and private school graduates and their likely or actual majors cut across the curriculum (16 sciences; 19 social sciences; 20 humanities – double majors more than offsetting ‘undecideds').
My major finding is that discussion classes evoke contradictory expectations and preferences. We can't, then, please all of our students all of the time. We might, however, engage more of our students more of the time were we to distinguish what, judging by their responses, I'll call three different scripts for discussion. For simplicity I'll talk about each script as if it were a type of student, but that misrepresents both how students respond to our cues and how the same student can adopt different scripts in different classes or even on different days in the same class. Also keep in mind that, out of the 62, I couldn't categorize nine responses and thirteen students mixed two of the three types. The remaining 40 had three rather different orientations, each with its own logic.
• The Learner : A learner sees class time as an opportunity for covering assignments. In this regard, discussions are “good learning tools” that can be “more efficient” than other methods. “After reading . . . it truly helps to go over it with others”; “it sinks in better”; gives one “a grasp of the subject matter”; and lets the class show “what we've learned.” A learner likes a professor who “keeps a firm hand on the discussion and provides useful comments” and who structures the session so that students get “a better understanding of the material read.” A good discussion stays on topic. A bad discussion doesn't “get anywhere” and ends up like separate tries at hitting “a dart board.” Learners don't always like discussions because it can be difficult to get “good notes” and, for some, such classes “are harder . . . to make a good grade in” than lectures.
• The Thinker : A thinker values “thought-provoking questions” and discussions that “make me think.” Where the learner likes to stay on the topic, the thinker wants to follow insights wherever they lead. Arguably, if the learner wants to master the assigned material to succeed as a student, the thinker wants to explore new frontiers to grow as a person. Where the two agree is that a good professor makes a big difference in what they can accomplish. At least some thinkers make it clear that they expect to get insights from their professors, not their peers.
• The Consumer : I'm unhappy with this label's negative connotations, but it best describes an if-it-interests-me stance that's rather like shopping. Where the learner and thinker are teacher-oriented, the consumer is oriented towards peers, the self, or both. A fixity of the self is assumed: discussions are good “mainly because the subject interests me” or when “the topics . . . are what I have been thinking about” already; and they're bad when the topic is “uninteresting,” or hard to relate to, or the class simply isn't “involved in the material.” Roughly a third of the consumers voice a peer orientation: it is “more interesting to hear what other students have to say than just listening to a professor.” Sometimes—perhaps because these students had chosen to take anthropology or were addressing an anthropologist—this is given a pluralist spin: discussion is good because “you can always learn from listening to lots of different perspectives,” and “everyone's ideas . . . contribute something.” Initially I thought this pluralist acceptance of others was distinct from a consumer stance that aims to please the self, but when I tried to separate the two I found what connected them was the intrinsic value of “opinions”: a good discussion lets “everybody . . . express their opinions” [pluralist]; it means “hearing other students' opinions”; and it's enjoyable in itself (“I like sharing my opinions” [self-oriented]). In contrast to the monologue of the lecture, a good “dialogue between students” means the professor is “a facilitator” who is “mostly inactive” and doesn't try to twist the students' dialogue into his or her lecture. A discussion “brings in many different thoughts and ideas” whereas a lecture, in taking a single position, makes it “difficult to get a sense of perspective.”
No one said teaching was easy! Inviting discussion would seem to unleash three conflicting scenarios. Even the two teacher-oriented styles are in tension: where the learner wants to go over the readings and get on with the course, the thinker seeks ‘meaning of life' reflections that can call conventional learning itself into question. In pleasing the learner with an on-task discussion, a teacher may confuse some students (there was “so much information in the question that we couldn't determine the question”) or insult the class (the professor “just asks detail-questions that everyone knows, but no one likes to answer because everyone knows”) and waste everyone's time by not offering anything new (a discussion is good if it is “not simply recapping what was read” and “more than a display that I have indeed done my reading”). Is discussion to cover the readings (Learner), excite the mind (Thinker), or express values (Consumer)? Is it to bring out opinions (Consumer) or the truth (Learner or Thinker)? For better or worse, these stances differ sharply.
What's a teacher to do? Were each student bound to just one of these three stances, pleasing one type would alienate the other two. Yet our students are nowhere near that fixed and rigid. Neither is our teaching. Any class and each of its meetings has a life of its own. So, too, do these stances. Or, to be exact, I should say that they didn't reduce to any other reality: a consumer, for example, could just as easily be male or female and as likely be in the humanities as the sciences. Even their self-reported participation in discussions (I gave them four choices: almost always / usually / occasionally / rarely) was independent of the orientation they expressed.
Although a better instrument or a larger sample might turn up some underlying patterns, it would be unwise to type our students too strictly. Instead, I prefer to see these three stances as ‘languages' of classroom discussion, each with its own internal logic and implicit conventions. Although a few students might be strongly committed to one language, many students are polyglots and almost anyone can come to appreciate a new language.
Two themes emerged across all three orientations. First, good discussions are engaging. Some value this involvement because it enhances their learning while others simply don't want to be bored (“it keeps me involved and . . . awake”; “to keep my head from hitting the desk”). In taking a shopping attitude, a consumer need not buy into a course. Engagement, then, is a decisive variable. I suspect that's less true for a learner who, arguably, is already committed to getting something out of class time.
Second, a discussion works if students are “comfortable” with each other, their teacher, and the class routine. Many respondents mentioned this happy state but few tried to explain it. “Comfortable” seemed to function as a code word for a relaxed style of authority that let discussion flow by detaching it from embarrassment, evaluation and schedules. So it helped if the professor were funny, self-confident, and forgiving. One student described how “once you began to talk the teacher looked very accepting and proud of what you were saying.” The opposite state, feeling uncomfortable, came from putting someone “on the spot, ” criticizing student responses, using discussion to test student knowledge, or requiring participation. Although one student appreciated required participation (having his grade docked for not speaking helped him “get over [his] fears”), a great many more thought this was intolerant and unfair (“don't hurt the quiet people”; “some are too shy”; “people's personalities may hold them back”) and found that it kept them from thinking (it “ended up making me nervous” so that “instead of listening . . . I was worrying about thinking up a valid argument”).
In evaluating student response, I typed up brief passages from each of the 62 responses. If you'd like to get beneath my types and themes to this somewhat rawer data, I'd be happy to send you the file.
Addendum to “Class Discussions and Student Scripts”
How, I've been asked, do the different stances break down by majors? That's an excellent question. I did work up that data, but ran out of time to qualify it properly. I didn't want to bore or insult you with an essay on method, but I also didn't want my findings to be misinterpreted because I hadn't contextualized them properly. I'm still caught in that bind, but--one professional to another--I'd settle for tacking on three sorts of qualifications as a ‘warning label.'
First, I didn't give the breakdown because I didn't want to depict my findings as more precise than they are or, given any such instrument, ever can be. As an anthropologist I put my trust in field observation. Although I can say quite precisely how students responded to the artificial conditions of my questionnaire, I don't know how they'd act in a naturally occurring class discussion. I am, however, confident that the three stances I've described are orientations that we can use to sort out what's going on in class discussions.
Second, the numbers urge us to type our students more rigidly than they actually are. I, for one, find this mental leap irresistible. So even though I know better, I have to keep reminding myself that in thinking of a particular student as, say, a Learner, I shouldn't treat that stance as if it were as fixed and given as height or hair color. To hold back that leap, I try to think of these stances as idioms. A student might reply to my questionnaire by giving responses that code clearly as a 'Learner' and even act that way in an actual class, but I don't know how committed he or she is to that stance. My best guess is that most of our students implicitly know the different idioms and many will switch into one idiom or another if we give them the right cues. Then, too, any class has a life of its own. A student who is a rigid 'Learner' may get caught up in the spirit of a 'Thinker' class and value that experience highly.
Third, my aim is to be descriptive, not prescriptive. I hope to inform faculty about what's ‘out there' and what ‘works' for others. I don't want to presume how someone in another field and with another style should deal with those realities. Given that goal, if I present these stances so that they're mistaken for fixed types, it might imply a prescriptive conclusion: if our students are of type ‘A,' then our teaching should be of that character. To me that's an issue for reflection and discussion, not a forgone conclusion.
With these ‘warning labels,' Here's how the types break down:
The Mixed combined two of the three stances. Were we to divide these up (e.g. a Learner/Consumer mix would be a half point for Learner and half for Consumer), we'd get a slightly different distribution. Were we to cross tabulate this regrouping by fields, we'd get the following:
Consumer Learner Thinker Unclassified It's not surprising, perhaps, that there are no “undecideds” among the Learners. When I checked for gender, women were a bit more likely to adopt a Consumer stance than men. Men, on the other hand, were more likely to be Unclassified. Arguably, what this gender difference suggests is that women are better socialized into current stances than men. A further difference is that men overall rated the frequency of their participation in discussion [almost always / usually / occasionally / rarely] slightly higher than women did. Lastly, private high school graduates come to Sewanee with a good deal more experience in discussion-oriented classes than public high school grads.
Is the proportion of these stances changing? We don't have hard evidence, but I'd be interested in your impressions. The marketing of colleges and other external conditions would suggest a shift from Learner toward Consumer as the default idiom that students bring to class. Yet I assume the actual proportion would vary with fields. The influence of premeds in a field like Biology might make Learner the dominant idiom, whereas Consumers dominated the Anthropology classes that I surveyed.
Richard
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Center for Teaching
March 12, 2003Discussion at Sewanee: A Report on Two Teaching Lunches
Discussions are hard to pin down. As one student in my survey said, “it's hard to get good notes.” Indeed! I'd like to report on our two lunches on discussion (Feb. 27 th and 28 th ) but my notes are a mess. That saves me from just reporting rather than thinking, but it also allows me to think whatever I'd like. Then, too, the fact that I didn't direct the conversation, that I let it flow, means we didn't reach any solid conclusions. Had I been more directive, would the sessions have been more mine than ours? I fear so. All these tradeoffs make discussions hard to evaluate.
Were our two lunches--as discussions on discussion--just exercises in irony? I hope not. Although we did in fact illustrate discussion's tradeoffs, our two sessions quickly turned to trading useful tips. These exchanges and the come-and-go nature of the sessions kept the conversation open. To capture that openness and yet bring some closure after the fact, I'll organize this report around how we addressed discussion's practical, political, and intellectual challenges.
• The Practical Challenge: Both sessions revolved around sharing specific techniques to get discussions to work. I noted roughly three types, what we might call ‘lecture-driven,' ‘free-standing,' and ‘assignment-driven' discussions. With lecture-driven, brief queries or reflections for students punctuate a lecture that still organizes the class. In the second type, free-standing discussion, a handout, brief lecture, current event or group-work generates class discussion that then organizes the class. The first and second types are independent of students' prior preparation. But in the third type, assignment-driven discussion, class covers readings or problems that students have done in advance. This type thus requires class-by-class assignments backed up by incentives or penalties. We heard about several effective schemes to ensure that students come to class prepared (students e-mail queries well before class; short quizzes at the beginning of class; a ‘response' essay done as homework is presented in class). Other such schemes are described in the “Faculty Comments” that I circulated earlier.
We didn't stop to evaluate these three types. Both sessions emphasized the third type so heavily that it's worth noting one virtue of the other two: they can sustain class when midterms roll around or the flu hits. I suspect the lecture-driven style pleases students that I've called Learners (see “Class Discussions and Student Scripts”) and, judging by comments, it is especially apt for some subjects like introductory Chemistry. In my experience, free-standing discussion requires some gimmick or insight (an idea, exercise, or issue) to generate involvement ‘cold.' That's risky—the ‘starter' doesn't always work—but this sort of discussion can be very engaging precisely because everyone feels qualified to participate. Assignment-driven discussion, on the other hand, is far more reliable. It's also better at staying ‘on topic.' It can, however, make class uncomfortable by putting students on the spot. Discussion can then be dutiful, not enthusiastic.
Assignment-driven discussion keeps students on a short leash. No doubt that's good for most learners most of the time, but thinking of my mismanaged life as a student, I wondered if playing catch up ever had any virtues. Could it be a learning style? Even though I worked hard, I'd get too involved in one subject to parcel out my time evenly. Might tackling large chunks of material intensely suit some ways of knowing or learning certain subjects? No one else thought so—indeed, the general reaction was that I should be kept away from the young and impressionable—but anthropology makes me skeptical of one-way-is-best approaches. Is the evenly paced, step-by-step, in-class learning that can work so well in, say, introductory math and foreign languages always best for every person and all subjects? For better or worse, that's how we've come to institutionalize learning and what assignment-driven discussion assumes.
• The Political Challenge: Carrot-or-stick methods carry their own politics. No doubt they work, but at what price? Are students stubborn like mules or curious like cats? Whatever we assume tends to be self-fulfilling. That thought introduces another of my ideas that went nowhere: the authority that primes discussion (e.g. grading participation) can also breed resistance (e.g. a sullen air) or detachment (e.g. boredom). Arguably, discussion rides a fine line. Without enough authority, many students don't prepare and won't venture to speak. Yet too much authority makes the discussion forced rather than self-sustaining. All of this gets negotiated, not only once for the semester, but again day by day and even moment by moment. In this intense politics, a strength of the discussion-priming schemes that we heard about was how their authority was either built into the syllabus or established quickly in the first class. Apparently, once discussion becomes ‘the rules of the game,' the teacher's agenda gets more day-to-day authority at less overall cost.
Yet we can't rid ourselves of authority quite that easily. A worry that came up but wouldn't go comfortably away was how to grade discussion and small group work fairly. One suggestion was to keep class participation to a small, tacitly optional part of the grade (e.g. figure averages with and without class participation and give a student the better of the two). Of course that only lessens a problem that it doesn't solve. In the end, as one person observed, speaking up and working with others are ‘real world' skills that are worth building into our courses even if we can't measure them as precisely as testing on lectures.
In one session it came out that senior faculty feel freer in opting for discussion than some junior faculty do. Although no one mentioned ownership, that's the issue. If a professor ‘owns' a course, either alone or jointly with students, then it can be taught as the teacher likes. But if the ‘owner' is the department or even the College, then the teacher must meet content and coverage demands that discussion can't easily handle. As long as our curriculum is built around content distinctions, these difficulties won't go away. In this instance, however, it might help were we to think of stakeholder s in a joint enterprise rather than a single owner exercising exclusive rights.
• The Intellectual Challenge: Discussion changes the intellectual challenge of teaching. A lecture allows us to state precise ideas precisely and thereby suits our training and sensibility as scholars. A discussion, in contrast, expects us to negotiate with students in hopes of finding focus and reason in assorted statements that can be vague, confused and off-topic. Asserting some order intellectually without discouraging participation socially is an enormously challenging task.
In my experience a discussion covers a lot less than a lecture. That puts a premium on what we choose to discuss. If a lecture compresses a wealth of knowledge into a story, then does a discussion compress that story into its most salient points? Is the most salient also the most important or just the most discussible? Whatever our answers, discussion redefines the nature of knowledge. It changes not just how we teach but what we teach. Here figuring out how to add the new without losing the best and the necessary of the old becomes a practical, political and intellectual challenge.
• Further Work: Our two session had an up-beat attitude that kept us from delving into difficult classes and shy students. We also didn't explore small group work or resolve the issues of equity in grading class participation. Lastly, if discussion requires us to be discussants, we didn't explore how one develops such skills.
I hope you'll contact me if you're interested in these subjects or have thoughts on these musings. My aim in writing these up as ‘reports' is to stimulate a continuing conversation, not offer definitive answers. Finally, I apologize for not specifically recognizing the individual contributions of all the participants, but that too is one of the difficulties with discussion.