Facilitating Discussions | Instructional Methods | Teaching Guides | Teaching Commons (2024)

General Strategies

• Define what a good discussion looks like. You might even do this with your students. Then create a checklist or rubric that maps out the elements of a good discussion and share with your students. You can refer to this rubric if and when things go off track.
• Assign midterm discussion grades that communicates to students how they are doing in this area. Or you might ask students to assign themselves grades based on criteria you’ve established and shared in advance.

Face-to-Face Strategies

• Take note of who is participating and who is not participating in class discussions. Avoid only looking at the students who are talking and limit excessive talkers’ contributions. Actively solicit input from quieter students.
• Reserve five minutes at the end of class and ask students to evaluate the effectiveness of the discussion in small groups or in a free write. You can collect written responses as “exit tickets” when students leave the classroom.

Online Strategies

• Provide meaningful, timely feedback: Don’t reply or grade every post. Pick out exemplars, offer private and public appreciation.
• Provide video recaps or written summaries of patterns in the discussion worthy of attention, and give praise to exemplars.
• Focus on quality over quantity: Reduce the number of discussions; use smaller groups instead of larger ones; ask them ahead of time about format/timelines.

Facilitating Difficult Discussions

Difficult discussions—often involving race, class, politics, religion and gender—can be anxiety-provoking experiences. You might be worried about being forthright with your opinions without hurting another person’s feelings, or about being able to anticipate or even control the outcome of the discussion. However, if you and your students approach conversations about difficult topics from a place of respect and openness to other viewpoints, those conversations can lead to authentic learning.

The suggestions for facilitating discussions are a great starting point for facilitating difficult discussions. Below are a few additional tips for facilitating discussion on difficult topics in ways that add to student learning.

Explain the Purpose of Difficult Discussions

Before your course begins, reflect on potential “hot button” topics that relate to your course and the learning outcomes you have established for your students. How do these topics intersect with what you want your students to learn? How might conversations about these topics also engage with your program’s, department’s, or DePaul’s learning outcomes?

For example, using DePaul’s learning outcomes as a basis, you might consider how difficult conversations might help your students “articulate their own beliefs and convictions, as well as others’ beliefs, about what it means to be human and to create a just society” and “evaluate ethical issues from multiple perspectives and employ those considerations to chart coherent and justifiable courses of action.” (Goal 3: Personal and Social Responsibility)

Consider including a statement in your syllabus, if appropriate, about how difficult dialogues may factor into the learning goals you’ve established for your course.

Create Ground Rules for Respectful Dialogue

If you co-create ground rules for respectful dialogue with your students, you can establish expectations early on and have something to fall back on if things get heated later in the quarter. Doing so also indicates that you take discussion seriously as a valuable learning experience.

One way to have students create their own ground rules is offered in Brookfield and Preskill’s Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms:

1. Individually, have students reflect on the best discussions they’ve ever had, and give them some time to write down a few characteristics that made them so memorable.
2. Then have students consider the worst discussions they’ve ever had, and have them write down a few characteristics of these discussions.
3. Have your students break into groups and share their reflections, beginning with the positive experiences and then the negative. Have students take notes on what patterns emerge—what do they have in common about their experiences with good discussions, and what made the bad ones so awful for everyone?
4. Taking account of both the positive and negative characteristics that emerge, have students write down at least three suggestions to propose as ground rules for discussion.
5. Have each group report back, making note of each suggestion on the board. Are there suggestions that came up more than once? Are there suggestions that the whole group endorses as significant? Identify the most important ones and incorporate them as the ground rules for future class discussions.

If you don’t have time to co-create ground rules with your students, consider adopting some for your class to follow. Here are some sample ground rules for discussion, courtesy of the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon:

• Listen actively and attentively.
• Ask for clarification if you are confused.
• Do not interrupt one another.
• Challenge one another, but do so respectfully.
• Critique ideas, not people.
• Do not offer opinions without supporting evidence.
• Avoid put-downs (even humorous ones).
• Take responsibility for the quality of the discussion.
• Build on one another’s comments; work toward shared understanding.
• Always have your book/readings in front of you.
• Do not monopolize discussion.
• Speak from your own experience, without generalizing.
• If you are offended by anything said during discussion, acknowledge it immediately.
• Consider anything that is said in class strictly confidential.