Preparing for Dynamic Discussions with Dakin Burdick
We are going to hit the ground running in our session, so please read through this material so you will
understand the organization and reasons behind what we’ll be doing. You should also expect that I
will refer to this material sometime during the workshop and that I will expect you to be able to
comment on it. Please don’t let us down!
The Discussion Toolkit
There are four tools you can use to develop a conversation with your class: homework, lecture, large
group discussion, and small group discussion. You have your own ways to use these, but let me take
a moment to explain how I use them. You might find something you can use as well.
For me, homework is most useful when given before class to prepare the students. Think of it as the
students’ ticket to get into class. They need to demonstrate that they’ve done the preparatory work
necessary for the discussion we want to talk place in class. The national accrediting bodies tell us
they should spend two hours working outside of class for every hour inside class. If you have content
(like this write-up!) that can help them prepare for class, give it to them through your LMS. Have
them read books, listen to podcasts, watch movies, or perhaps even watch a narrated PowerPoint that
you have put together over specialized material. People can read about 3-5 times as fast as you can
speak, so it is a more efficient use of their time to get the content that way, if they can. Have them
demonstrate mastery of that material through a quiz, reflection paper, or other tool. Make it worth
relatively little (15-20% of an entire semester’s grades), so they will hopefully feel less need to cheat
or have someone else do their work for them. Make it moderately challenging, and make sure they
spend much more time on it than you do. You have plenty of work to do already! The largest portion
of your time will probably be spent ensuring that they understand that you are serious about academic
honesty. It will take a few weeks for everyone to figure that out, but it you establish a firm presence
at the start of the semester, the rest of the semester will be easier. You’ll still have one or two outliers
though, so stay alert! Make sure that the few who try to cheat do not invalidate all the good work that
the rest of the students do. That will, admittedly, take time. On the other hand, you do need to give
feedback, but use rubrics, boilerplate responses, and group feedback to reduce the time it takes you to
give it. Using Just-in-Time Teaching can increase the usefulness of this type of homework by
allowing you to read and grade it before they set foot in the classroom. That will help you teach them
because you will know what they understand and what they don’t, and allow you to customize the
class for each new group of students. It will also make the class more fun for you, because you won’t
be just giving the same lesson year after year.
Lectures are used to introduce new material, especially material for which you couldn’t find effective
readings. Lectures can be used to set the tone of the class, to give group feedback, to demonstrate
personal expertise, and to interest students in the topic. Keep the time you lecture short, say 10-15
minutes at the start of the class. After that, you start to lose them, and you will have a choice of trying
to entertain them or making them work. Make them work. Prepare small group exercises that force
students to practice and learn disciplinary skills, knowledge, and attitudes. Organizing this sort of
exercise is what we’ll practice in the workshop, and I’ll share out a number of different discussion
protocols so you can vary your instruction and also so you can find methods that work with your
course. If you still need more at the end of the workshop, please let me know and I’ll help you
develop them.
Dakin Burdick, 2014 -- dakinburdick@yahoo.com
Small group discussion is used to build student confidence and enthusiasm, and to give students time
to practice the things that you want them to learn. If something is important for them to learn, then
the best time for them to practice that is when you are in the room with them, so you can help coach
and guide them. Make the work authentic, which is to say it should be as close an approximation to
what they’ll really be doing as possible. The transfer of their learning will be better because of that.
Make sure that calculations don’t come out even every time, and that science labs are explorations
rather than attempts to duplicate someone else’s examples. If they have an opportunity to fail, you
will create teaching moments where they are very open to learn and are motivated to do so. Again,
student work should be moderately challenging. Don’t drop them in the deep blue sea, but also don’t
give them something so easy that the best students are constantly bored. Small group work should
also be limited in time and scope. Once one or two groups are done, bring people together to debrief,
and to enlarge upon the topic. Otherwise, they will begin to talk about their social lives, and you will
lose all the energy you have built up.
Finally, large group discussions are used for
students and instructor to exchange knowledge,
build a rapport, question assumptions and enlarge
the conversation. Like many other instructors, I
think a good large group discussion is the most
fun to run, but at the undergraduate level it also
has to be limited in scope. In a face-to-face large
group discussion, only a few students have an
opportunity to talk, and although to you it may
feel like a great discussion, there will probably be
a lot of quiet people in the room, and it is better to
keep the large group discussion brief and then
move them back into small group work. The key
is to keep them working. As the saying goes,
whoever is doing the work is doing the learning. In an online discussion, large group discussions
allow everyone to contribute, though you should be ready to cover more territory than you would
face-to-face.
I usually talk more about small group discussion protocols in my sessions, because they are more
difficult to run and because they are even more important tools than large group discussion. To make
up for that, I’m including here a description of the some of the facilitation skills that will help run
large group discussions, and some tips on designing prompts for them.
Facilitation Skills for Large Group Discussion
1. Use student feedback to customize every class. Use Just-in-Time-Teaching or another form of
pre-work to ensure that participants have something to share in the conversation. In class, use
some form of light grading to ensure the participants do the work.1
2. Be supportive. Use eye contact, facial gestures and body language to express your interest and
enthusiasm for their answers. Praise three times as much as you critique. Say “excellent” or “good
1
Gregor Novak, Andrew Gavrin, Wolfgang Christian, & Evelyn Patterson, Just-in-Time Teaching:
Blending Active Learning with Web Technology (Prentice Hall, 1999).
Dakin Burdick, 2014 -- dakinburdick@yahoo.com
idea,” rather than “ok,” “yes,” or “alright.” Acknowledge any original ideas but don’t judge them
immediately. Even when they are wrong, try to be tactful about it. The class empathizes with the
participant speaker, and embarrassing or laughing at a response will shut everyone else down as
well.2 An example of a proper response might be: “That’s an interesting approach, but most of the
sources have a different view. How about x, what does it claim?”
3. Allow at least 10 seconds of wait time.3 This will allow participants time to absorb the new
information and form a response. Do not interrupt their responses. Give them time to express their
thoughts. If their answer is very brief, ask them clarifying or probing questions to get them to
respond more fully.
4. Make sure everyone can hear the participant’s response. Encourage the participant to stand up
or speak up if necessary. You may feel you have to paraphrase their response so everyone will
hear, but try to keep this to a minimum.
5. Encourage participant to participant conversations. Where possible, allow participants to
have practice constructing their own arguments and understanding. Small group work is intended
to (1) re-energize participants through variety in conversation methods and (2) to build participant
confidence in preparation for larger conversations. Redirect questions aimed at yourself as the
instructor so that twice as many participants get this sort of practice, and so that they do not
continually expect the “right” answer from you.4 Don’t feel you have to respond verbally to every
statement. If there is good energy in the room, nod or point to the next participant to encourage
further discussion. Incorporate useful participant responses into your comments.5
6. Don’t allow a few participants to dominate the floor. Redirect questions to another participant,
suggest that overly insistent participants chat with you about the subject after class, or suggest
that the class hear from someone else.
Designing Prompts (Questions) for Large Group Discussion
1. Build in Complexity (simple to complex, specific to general). Have the questions build in
difficulty. Use Bloom’s Taxonomy to determine the order of complexity, starting the
“Remembering” and working up to “Creating.” Start with closed questions (simple factual
responses) to give participants confidence and get them talking. Then switch to more open-ended
questions to challenge the participants.6
2. Avoid dichotomous questions. If a participant can answer it by “yes” or “no,” they won’t have
much of a chance to demonstrate understanding or higher cognitive operations. Ask a focused or
convergent question when you want the participants to move to closure and have a specific
2
3
4
5
6
J. Sprague & D. Stuart, The Speaker’s Handbook (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p.
331.
Mary Budd Rowe, “Wait-time and rewards as instructional variables, their influence in language, logic
and fate control. Part 1: wait time,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 11 (1974), pp. 81–94.
J.H. Clarke, “Designing Discussions as Group Inquiry,” College Teaching, 36:4 (1988), pp. 140-143.
Barbara Gross Davis, Tools for Teaching (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1993), pp. 82-95.
R.T. Hyman, “Questioning in the College Classroom,” Idea Paper, 8 (1982) p. 3.
Dakin Burdick, 2014 -- dakinburdick@yahoo.com
answer for you. Ask an open-ended or divergent question when you want the participants to
expand a conversation and think at a higher cognitive level.
3. Ask the same question three times. Reframe the question in three different ways, but keep the
question at the same level in Bloom’s Taxonomy.7 This will give the participants more time to
think and more ways to connect to the question, while ensuring that the question does not become
three different questions.
4. Don’t fish for a specific answer: Do not ask a question with the sole intent of having a
participant name the item you want them to. Make the questions meaningful.
5. Ask musing questions. Occasionally let the participants know that you form some questions for
yourself. This can help participants begin to think of themselves as colleagues. An example of a
musing question might be: “I wonder if it’s accurate to say x?” Admit when you don’t know the
answer.8
6. Don’t give a “programmed answer.” Don’t answer the question for the participants. An
example of this error would be: “Why doesn’t the moon have an atmosphere? It has very weak
gravity, doesn’t it?”9
7. Avoid rhetorical questions. If you ask five rhetorical questions in your monologue, participants
may not recognize that they are supposed to respond to question #6. In effect, you are training
them to not respond to questions.
8. Avoid questions that would require participants to seem unintelligent if they answered.
Some examples of this sort of question include: “Does everyone understand?” “Does anyone have
any questions?” “Who needs me to go over this explanation again?” “This should be clear now –
any questions?” “Of course, x should follow y. Any questions?”
7
8
9
John D.W. Andrews, “The Verbal Structure of Teacher Questions: Its Impact on Class Discussion,”
POD Quarterly, 2:3&4 (Fall/Winter 1980), pp. 129-163.
S.S. Goodwin, G.W. Sharp, E.F. Cloutier, and N.A. Diamond, Effective Classroom Questioning (Urbana:
Office of Instructional Resources, University of Illinois, 1985).
Douglas Duncan & Amy Singel Southon, “Six Ways to Discourage Learning,”
http://www.aas.org/education/sixways_doc.html, University of Chicago, c1990.
Dakin Burdick, 2014 -- dakinburdick@yahoo.com