Engaging Class Discussion
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Good Participation

I will grade student participation in this class. Participating in discussion does not necessarily mean talking a lot or showing everyone else that you know or have studied a lot. Good discussion participation involves people trying to build on, and synthesize, comments from others, and on showing appreciation for others' contributions. It also involves inviting others to say more about what they are thinking. Try ask different kinds of questions for different purposes to expand your critical thinking skills.¹ Being able to engage in rational dialogue on complex public issues is vital to civic competence in a democracy and assessing the truth about a subject is a vital to intellectual development.²

Behaviors that are evidence of good participation:

• Engagement: Student proactively contributes to class by offering ideas and/or asks questions more than once per class.
• Listening: Student listens when others talk, both in groups and in class. Student incorporates or builds off of the ideas of others.
• Supportive behavior: Student almost never displays disruptive behavior during class.
• Preparation: Student is almost always prepared for class with assignments and required class materials.

Examples of good participation in class discussion:

• Ask a question or make a comment that shows you are interested in what another person said
• Use natural body language to show interest in what different speakers are saying
• Ask a question or make a comment that encourages another person to elaborate on something they have already said
• Ask another student to explain or give an example of something that they're talking about
• Make a comment that underscores the link between two people's contributions & make this link explicit in your comment
• Ask a cause and effect question - for example, "can you explain why you think it's true that if these things are in place such and such a thing will occur?"
• When you think it's appropriate, ask the group for a moment's silence to slow the pace of conversation to give you, and others, time to think
• Write a Comment Card comment prompts us to examine discussion dynamics

Examples of good participation in either class discussion or online:

• Bring in a resource (a reading, web link, video) not covered in the syllabus but adds new information/perspectives to our learning
• Asking a question that opens up a new area of exploration for us
• Make a summary observation that takes into account one or more people's contributions and touches on a recurring theme in the discussion
• Make a comment indicating that you found another person's ideas interesting or useful. Be specific as to why this was the case
• Contribute something that builds on, or springs from, what someone else has said. Be explicit about the way you are building on the other person's thoughts
• Post a comment on the course chat room that summarizes our conversations so far and/or suggests new directions and questions to be explored in the future
• Find a way to express appreciation for the insight you have gained from the discussion. Try to be specific about what it was that helped you understand something better.

The Discussion Leading Project

Now that you have had experience as an active listener and contributor to critical thinking discussions, it is time for you to lead and facilitate one. Leading discussion is a powerful way to demonstrate and practice critical thinking. Your overall objective is to help us all become more adept at forming judgments about social issues around drugs so that we can suggest informed social solutions to these problems based on the knowledge we have available.

You and a partner are assigned a date on the D2L Main Page. You should contact your partner(s) and split-up responsibilities. Since the overall grade is a group grade, all members of your team should contribute equally.

Your objective

You must accomplish three things during your discussion:

1. Discuss topical content to help clear-up confusion, reinforce major points, and reflect on our experiences with the material.
2. Critically examine at least one important question at issue through discussion.
3. Either critically analyze or evaluate at least one text that your team contributes.
4. Keep the discussion focused around the assigned texts.

Selecting texts

• Below the Main Page is a collection of links to texts that past students have used, arranged by subject. I will make some suggestions. You do not have to use the texts that I selected. This is your discussion.
• The texts you plan to critically examine do not have to be written, they may also be audio, video, or some other medium I haven't yet considered. The main requirement is that they be related to the primary reading.
• Texts that provide an alternative point of view are inherently stimulating, but texts that support the primary text are also effective. Plan to critically compare points of view, information, and opinions between the two texts.
• You may also choose to critically examine the primary reading itself. If you choose this route, you should examine the author's point of view. What is the purpose of the writing? Has data been cherry picked to make a point? Play the devil's advocate: Are there other valid perspectives that can be examined? A potentially useful way to stimulate critical examination of the primary text is to locate a one-star book review online. Many of these reviews are too light on substance to be useful for your purpose, but there are always a few that make excellent points worth examining.

What to turn-in and due dates

By 1:00 PM seven days in advance of your discussion day, at least one member of your team must submit to the D2L Submission folder the filled-in Discussion Leading Template containing:

1. A list of Vocabulary, if applicable. (The only optional component)
2. A list of Key Ideas. Point the reader to the most important features of the article through reading comprehension questions. These questions should be specific, fact-based questions that direct your reader to understanding of the most important points in the reading. The answers should be simple lists, statistics, or explanations of concepts that require simply quoting of paraphrasing the text. If you could answer the question in under two minutes, it is appropriate here. Your team should contribute at least four items to this section. I will be grading on both quality and quantity.
3. Answers to your Key Ideas. Provide answers to the questions you posed above. Writing these will help confirm whether or not your questions have clear factual answers as posed (if they do not have factual answers, then you should probably upgrade them to Thinking Critically). Also, be aware that your answers help me to evaluate your team's preparation.
4. One or more Thinking Critically prompts. Each of these challenges the reader to consider an important question at issue to help the reader form judgments around a difficult problem and consider solutions. Set a purpose for the day. Give open-ended questions that tie the reading to other topics. These questions should stimulate discussion and not be easily answered.
5. A link to or attachment of a selected text to critically analyze or evaluate.
6. A short description of your agenda including the specific critical thinking skills you plan to apply.
7. Four questions with answers for the Reading Guide Quiz. Use True/False, Multiple Choice, Multi-Select, Matching, Ordering, or Fill in the Blanks format (the blanks must have a limited number of possibilities). These must be related to the readings and one can focus on a critical thinking skill.
8. At least one short Homework Activity. Your activity should help students prepare for discussion. Ideally, it should take less than 15 minutes to complete. You do not need to do your own homework activity, you will automatically recieve points for simply designing it.

By the next class period after your presentation, grade the homework Activity that you assigned in your Daily Guide and submit the scored papers to the instructor in alphabetized by first name. The rubric is below. You may wish to consult the grading profiles for guidance.

How your team will be evaluated

Pulling off a great classroom discussion that involves all students is a complex and challenging project that I've broken it down into two parts: (1) planning the discussion and (2) facilitating an effective discussion. The total points will be divided equally between these two parts. All members of the team will receive the same group grade. The instructor will grade your team using a grading rubric. You should read this rubric to understand how the points will be distributed.

How to prepare

The next page will cover advice on how to prepare for this assigned.

Developing A Class Discussion

1. Try to select one text that provides some well-reasoned information to ground the discussion and one text that is less objective for critical analysis. Often one text can satisfy both criteria.

2. Read, watch, or listen to your texts very carefully, preferably more than once.

2. Think about what you want to get across to your classmates.

• What were the most important ideas in each of text? Consider focusing on what you found to be the most insightful.
• How do the texts relate to each other? Does one reading shed new light on the other? What questions do they raise about each other?
• Does some aspect of a text flawed or lack objectivity? Consider helping the class to discover the author's implicit agenda, biases, assumptions, inaccurate information, and/or fallacies.
• Note details of the texts that elicit a strong emotional reaction. These details are likely to touch on some powerful personal biases and/or assumptions in the reader. Consider trying to uncover these.
• Consider helping the class to identify the implications of the ideas in the texts and/or the implications of criticizing the texts.

3. Carefully consider your objectives for discussion.

• Do you want students to apply newly learned skills, mull over new subject matter, learn to analyze arguments critically, practice synthesizing conflicting views, or relate material to their own lives? These goals are not mutually exclusive, but they require different types of direction.
• Use discussion to help students link concepts to their own lives; to encourage students to evaluate material critically; and to address topics that are open-ended, have no clear resolution, and/or can be effectively addressed through multiple approaches.
• Provide students opportunities to "warm up" through small group mini-discussions, brief (one- to five-minute) in-class writing exercises on the topic, and/or a short homework exercise prior to the session that focuses students on the topic(s) to be covered.
• Consider using a variety of question types such as exploratory, relational, cause and effect, diagnostic, action, and hypothetical thought experiments.
• Refer to the Guide to Critical Thinking and—if you are stuck—ask the instructor for advice.

4. Once you have decided what you want to convey, think about how you want to convey it.

• Think about what method might get your ideas across best. Do you want to divide the class into small groups for discussion? Can you think of a role playing assignment that would get people to think about different perspectives of an issue? Do you want to give a short introduction and then moderate a large-group discussion?
• Read Dr. Stephen Brookfield's excellent compilation of classroom discussion formats you may wish to try.
• The Cult of Pedagogy Blog offers some interesting ideas that might get you inspired.
• Some students have created surveys for the students to answer before or during class. Make sure this will be appropriate and useful before choosing this option. Sometimes surveys add value, other times they don't. You have many free online options for surveys before class, but for surveys during class I recommend Poll Everywhere.

5. Decide how you want the class to prepare.

• Carefully craft the Key Ideas and Quiz questions to focus students on essential information.
• Craft critical thinking discussion prompts that get students thinking about your own interests. Your enthusiasm will help carry the discussion.
• Devise a short homework Activity to help focus student preparation on your goals. Some ideas:
• Ask students to explore a personal assumption. For example, "What is the purpose of a prison and who is sent there?"
• Ask students to adopt specific points-of-view. For example, "How would a conservative and liberal politician frame this issue?"
• Sentence completion is an open-ended tool for critical thinking. For example:
• "What most struck me about the text we read to prepare for the discussion today is…?" [Uncover assumptions and biases]
• "The question that I'd most like to ask the author of the text is…" [Evaluate information and/or arguments]
• "The idea I most take issue with in the text is…" [Challenge personal assumptions or uncover flawed reasoning]

6. Decide how you want to divide up the tasks involved in leading the discussion. Will one person give the introduction, and the other(s) ask questions? Will you each take charge of parts of the class in small groups, then meet as a whole and discuss comparative conclusions the second half of the class time? Do you want to split up the readings each person is responsible for leading discussion about, or do you want to share responsibility jointly for all of them? (In any case, ALL of the leaders should understand ALL of the texts thoroughly.)

7. Prepare selected passages—quotes, statistics, or other examples—from the texts to interject to stimulate discussion since anyone can respond to a passage. It's better to be overprepared and only discuss 25% of what you planned than to have nothing to talk about and awkward silence.

8. On your template, provide the instructor with a succinct and clear explanation of your agenda. Plan for part of this to be your introduction that will start the class session.

9. Using the Template as a starting point, prepare organized notes about what is going to be said/done (by you or someone in the discussion group), and in what order instead of relying on flipping through your highlighted readings looking for the interesting parts. Prepare to be flexible and allow a few moments here and there for the unexpected turns mentioned in the last point.

Facilitating An Engaging Class Discussion

Set the agenda and expectations

1. Introduce the discussion by telling the class what your focus is, and why it is important.

2. Outline how your discussion will procede. Remind students of the expectations. If you planned an activity, such as a debate or a small group exercise, explain the rules and structure of the activity.

3. An excellent way to get students to focus and connect to the topic at hand is to ask students to share their thought-provoking responses to the homework Activity. They can share their responses either in small groups or as a whole-class. Make sure students are jotting down responses that they'd like to hear more about. After all responses have been read, have students begin the discussion by asking about the responses they wanted to hear more about.

4. Don't expect your discussion to go according to a plan and don't try to force it to do so. Sometimes the best parts of a discussion are the unexpected turns it takes. Having said that, keep it on course by being well-organized.

5. If you find that you cannot fit all of the points you want to make into the discussion, it will not end the world if you omit some of them. More is gained by everyone if you cover the interesting points thoroughly than if you rush through your list of discussion questions.

Be a leader

Be a leader in discussions by guiding students appropriately. Students are not always looking for you to be quiet and to let them take over, which is actually a threatening and challenging prospect for certain students. They want you to model what you're asking them to do. They want you to give them some directions on how the process should go. They'll often look for you to bring the discussion back on track if someone is taking it in an irrelevant direction. They're looking for you to make sure that some people don't dominate. Despite all the ground rules that you have, people will dominate, and it's your responsibility to say, "Well I think we need to open this up. I'd like to hear what other people think about this."³

Think about your "presentation of self." Be confident, upbeat, engaged, and focused. Make eye contact, speak clearly, and don't rush. It is not necessary to cover everything you have prepared.

Facilitate a climate for discussion and learning

You can also significantly increase the quantity and quality of participation simply by creating an encouraging environment for discussion.

1. Try not to spill all of your beans at once. A discussion should build gradually and move forward from point to point. If you explain your whole interpretation of the readings at the very beginning, there is nowhere to go. Save some of the good stuff for later.

2. Avoid answering your own questions before you even ask them. For example, avoid saying, "We thought that XXX's analysis really did a bad job of taking race into consideration. What did you think about XXX's use of race?"

3. Use open-ended questions that will get people to share their own ideas about the texts.

• Avoid questions that begin with "Do you think..." because they can easily be answered "yes" or "no."
• Questions that begin with "what, why, and how," generally will spark discussion.

4. Keep the discussion focused by enforcing the following guidelines for how you expect students to participate. If you wish to add other specific guidelines, state them at the start of class.

• If a student states their opinion, invite them to critically examination that opinion. Ask them about their facts, assumptions, and reasons for forming their judgment.
• If the discussion strays to relevant ideas that are outside the scope of texts, refocus the discussion to what we know and be clear about what we can potentially learn with further research.
• If a student states a fact the seems imprecise, ask them to find the reference and verify that they are correctly using the fact.
• If the discussion strays too far from your agenda, it is appropriate to stop, point this out, and refocus it.

5. Probe for clarity, definitions, assumptions, and elaboration.^4,5,6 Conversational speaking is briefer than writing. For this reason, almost any point a participant makes provides you with an opportunity to engage them in critical thinking! Ask the participant to apply critical analysis or evaluation:

• "Where did you get this information?" Evaluate the certainty of truth in information (also see Appendix Question 2)
• "Please define what you mean by..." Clarify their information and/or values (also see Appendix Question 3)
• "Please explain the premises that lead you to this conclusion. I didn't follow your reasoning." Provide more detail to the argument
• "Please explain how you got to this conclusion. I think I missed something." Explain the steps and inferences that lead to the conclusion
• "If what you say is true, what general idea are you assuming?" Uncover assumptions
• "If what you say is true, what does that imply for society or for the future?" Explore implications (also see Appendix Question 6)

6. Encourage student-to-student interaction is the best way to keep a discussion going. It ensures a lively discussion as opposed to a back-and-forth between you and one or two students. Here are a few prompts that may help guide your responses:

• "Sandra has shared an interesting viewpoint on our reading. Who else shares a similar viewpoint?"
• "Who would like to play devil's advocate here? Who sees something we're all missing?"
• "Dave, when you heard Roberto make that: comment, what were you thinking?"
• If a student asks you a question, you can always respond with, "That's a good question. What do the rest of you think about that?"
• "We haven't heard much from this side of the room. What would you like to add?"

7. When students ask questions, try to help them find the answers for themselves. One good strategy is to ask leading follow-up questions. For inspiration, use the questions above and the questions in the Dealing with Conflict Appendix. At some point, you might ask the class to find some information on the internet or in the text to help a student arrive at an answer.

8. Pause to give students time to reflect on your summaries or others' comments.

9. Summarize student responses without taking a stand one way or another.

10. Take notes of main points on the board. Attempt to write everyone's ideas down and relate them. Toward the end of the discussion, review the main ideas, the thread of the discussion, and conclusions.

11. If some students aren't prepared with questions and responses (hopefully this will not happen to you), do not let the discussion wander. Have some specific quotes, statistics, or other examples from the texts ready. If you read a passage and ask for responses, even underprepared students will have something to talk about.

12. If arguments develop, try to resolve disputes by appeal to objective evidence and clarification of values rather than authority of position. If the dispute is over values, help students clarify their values and respect each others', even if resolution is not possible. Disputes can often form the basis for interesting writing assignments. If there is an emotionally-charged disagreement, try the following strategies to steer the conversation onto a productive track. The Dealing with Conflict Appendix offers advice on this.

Conclude

1. To wrap-up, summarize a few key points and insights. If you wrote on the board, you should use refer back to the ideas on the board. You want the students to leave with a few specific take home messages that they will hopefully remember.

2. Invite students to give a last reactions to the discussion.

Appendix: Handling Emotionally Charged Disagreements

Seven Strategies to Encourage Critical Thinking

We live in politically polarized times. For a democracy to function, we must be able to have difficult conversations about values issues. Telling someone they are wrong, makes them defensive and is likely to shut down critical thinking and evoke reactance (the feeling that our behavioral freedoms are being resticted) which encourages motivated reasoning (emotionally-based reasoning that favors concusions that we want to believe). When we use motivated reasoning...

• we give ourselves permission to believe something if we can simply find one piece of evidence or one argument to support our beliefs and
• we convince ourselves that it is a restriction on our personal freedom to be forced to believe something that we do not want to believe.

Instead, we must use approaches that build trust and facilitate critical thinking. Otherwise, we might spend unproductive hours talking past each each other while getting increasingly agitated. Motivated reasoning tends to cause us to reinforce rather than question our ideas. The goal of discussion around contraversial values issues is to make decisions in accord with our values guided by factual information about the issue. We must think critically and with clarity about our values and the facts.

Listen and be curious about a person's point-of-view and experience. Have some humility about the correctness of your position and you are likely to learn a lot about the experiences of the person you disagree with. People on opposite sides of an issue hold positions that make sense in the context of their information diet and values.

Put points of disagreement in the form of questions that lead a person through the steps of critical thinking. People are less defensive if asked to respond to a sincere question. Moreover, the person answering the questions will often discover the holes in their own thinking for themselves. Self-discovery is more likely to unseat uncritical thinking because it does not evoke reactance. The following are examples of such questions.

1. Find points of agreement to get people with opposing opinions on the same team. This builds trust, which predisposes the parties to listen to each other and softens blows of disagreement. This approach clearly draws lines between where the parties agree and disagree. By establishing shared values, differences in assumptions and mental models become clear and easier to accept. Facilitators can explicitly ask participants to compare and contrast their views with those of others. Common ground inquiry can be especially powerful for enhancing listening among adversaries who might otherwise tend to dismiss one another's views summarily.⁷ Given such a relationship, the facilitator can attempt with gentle insistence to engage participants in expansive social role-taking, asking students to make conjectures about others' points of view, in the sense of generating sympathetically constructive reasons for holding those differing positions. The point of this strategy is to nurture understanding, not necessarily consensus. Understanding through social role-taking is an essential part of developing an informed position and, as research indicates,⁸ a necessary precondition to developing a fully reasoned moral position. For example,

• "In what ways is your view similar to that of...?"
• "State one thing on this topic that you think I do not believe." Writer Scott Adams calls this 'The Magic Question' for its miraculous power to diffuse disagreements by starting a discussion that debunk stereotype assumptions.⁹

2. Identify and evaluate information that has uncertain truth value. The answer will lead to a critical examination of facts. If facts are found to have questionable truth value, all parties should agree that this information cannot be used in the discussion. However, such information can be used to explore hypothetical "what if" scenarios to explore how participants apply their values.

• "Where did you get that information?"
• "We cannot verify that your fact is true. How different would your judgment be if it were or were not true? How do your values cause your judgment to change based on this fact?"

3. Identify central values conflicts. Judging which values should be upheld in specific situations presumes, at minimum, clearly recognizing the particular values in conflict. Build a common vocabulary on the board for describing values. Lockwood and Harris describe eight central values: authority, equality, liberty, life, loyalty, promise keeping, property, and truth.⁴ Explicitly identifying these values can set the stage for systematic and productive discussion.

4. Compare values justifications. Extends general probes of participants' reasoning by asking them to explicitly to address the heart of the conflict: Why do they give greater importance to some values than to others in the case under discussion? For example,

• "Why in a specific case are property rights more important than the government's duty to provide a genuinely adequate minimum quality of material life?"

5. Raise comments to the level of general principle. Ask participants to consider whether the particular priorities identified in one case should be generalized into a set of principles to guide actions in similar cases. Posing analogous or slightly modified cases can help students test their tentative general principles. For example,

• "In the case of Anne Frank, do you think it is always or ever right to lie to save a human life? Why?"
• "If it were right to lie to save a relative's life, would it also be right to lie to save a friend, stranger, or enemy? If so, why? If not, what is the relevant moral difference?"

6. Examine implications and values. One major source of public controversy is the ambiguity associated with predicting or controlling the actual consequences of policy decisions. A second is the difficulty of achieving consensus on the meaning of generally cherished values such as equality, justice, loyalty, and the common good. This is the case in part because there the very definitions of these terms lack universality—are prescriptive and value-based rather than descriptive in nature. Uncover implicit value positions by probing to clarify the meaning of terms used by participants.

1. "What would it look like if your idea played out?" Examine both reasoning and implications. This question alone is very powerful and may need no follow-up. However, you can then ask to focus on values.
2. "How do you define 'loyalty' or 'justice'?" In cases of disputed facts, predictions, or meanings of terms, stipulating can provide a sharpened focus on value issues when evaluating consequences.
3. "If we say the effects will be ... and/or define loyalty as ..., how does that affect your view as to what is the right policy or action?"

7. Identify barriers between Should and Would. Ideally, we want participants to only make informed and reasoned private judgments but, when appropriate, to act publicly in accordance with those judgments. In other words, we all have a civic interest in whether a citizen would act in particular situations as we think persons should act. In probing the relationship between should and would, facilitators might be alert to participants' concerns about incurring the charge of hypocrisy. If the personal level appears initially too threatening, facilitators may ask questions at a generalized level.

• "Are there factors that might interfere with persons' doing what they think should be done? How might a person deal with these factors constructively?"

Agree to disagree. During any argument, I keep the advice of Neil deGrasse Tyson in the back of my mind, "If an argument lasts more than five minutes, both sides are wrong." At some point, if no progress is being made toward understanding, both parties must let go of trying to be "right" and accept that they disagree.¹⁰ A failure to make further progress occurs when there is either (1) insufficient information to evaluate the stronger argument, (2) at least one party is unwilling to abandon a long-held assumption, (3) at least one party is talking past the other to make a different point and isn't actually listening to the other, or (4) the two positions are equally valid within different value systems. Either way, it's best to move on to a more fruitful question of inquiry. At minimum, if both parties have made some progress in understanding each other's values, arguments, and points-of-view in such a way that they respect the other's perspectives, then it was a valuable discussion.

We have to accept that other people have different values. Often in life, all we can do is respectfully clarify points of agreement and disagreement. From there we must decide what we are willing to accept and what we wish to change. If we want to change minds and persuade people to our positions and values, it will rarely happen in one conversation. It will never happen by disrespecting the people we disagree with. Respect the humanity and dignity of those you disagree with, engage with them and their ideas, and you will be most likely to find convergence of thought.

References

1. Brookfield, Stephen D.; Participation Self-Assessment Form. https://www.stephenbrookfield.com/workshop. Accessed 12 Dec. 2019.

2. Kelly, T. E. (1986) Discussing Controversial Issues: Four Perspectives on the Teacher's Role, Theory and Research in Social Education, 14(2): 113–38.

3. Four Ways to Spark Engaging Classroom Discussions. Association of College and University Educators. 30 Dec. 2015. https://community.acue.org/blog/four-more-ways-to-spark-classroom-discussions-and-keep-students-engaged/. Accessed 22 Nov. 2019.

4. Lockwood, A.; Harris, D. Reasoning with Democratic Values; Ethical Problems in United States History, vols. 1 and 2, Instructors Manual; Teachers College Press: New York, 1985.

5. Newmann, F. M.; Oliver, D. W. Clarifying Public Controversy: An Approach to Teaching Social Studies; Little, Brown: Boston, 1970.

6. Maresh, Justin J.; A Guide to Critical Thinking; http://think.maresh.info. Accessed 3 Feb 2020.

7. Berman, S.; (1987) Beyond Critical Thinking: Teaching for Synthesis, Educators for Social Responsibility Forum 6, no. 1, 1(10).

8. Selman, R. L.; Social-Cognitive Understanding: A Guide to Educational and Clinical Practice, Moral Development and Behavior: Theory Research and Social Issues, ed. T. Lickona; Holt, Rinehart, & Winston: 1976, pp 299–316.

9. Adams, S.; Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America; Portfolio: New York, 2019.

10. Tyson, Neil deGrasse; "Chapter 19: Paths To Discovery"; The Columbia History of the 20th Century; Bulliet, Richard W. (ed.); Columbia University Press: New York, NY, 1998.