Facilitating Discussions

Facilitating discussions during class can improve student engagement, enhance critical thinking skills, and promote deeper learning. Students are more likely to retain information and will be able to apply it in new and different contexts. Furthermore, classroom discussions can help to create a more collaborative learning environment, where students can learn from each other and build upon each other's ideas.

When facilitating discussions, there are general principles that every instructor should follow to achieve engaging and successful discussions:

  • Have an objective: Discussions are good opportunities for students to better get to know their peers, but every discussion should have a purpose. Tying your discussions with learning outcomes can help guide you in specific concepts you would like your students to learn and can help you formulate your question.
  • Set students up for success: Providing students with specific tasks to prepare for the discussion can help them have something to discuss in-class. This might be an assignment prompt, brief quiz, or short video due at the beginning of class.
  • Establish a safe environment: Create a space where students can feel safe to express confusion. Invite students who haven't shared to add their perspective. Create norms (allow students to say "Pass" if they are called on but aren't comfortable speaking in the large group) and show respect for various perspectives.

Teaching Format Modifications

Discussions in the classroom setting provides your students opportunities to better get to know each other and expound on the information that they are learning with their peers. Discussions may look different depending on the delivery format of your course. Below are suggestions on how you can adapt your classroom discussions based on your course format.

Online

Discussion forums have the potential to be the most valuable learning opportunity in online environments. Instructors can ignite discussions by requiring substantive posts, asking probing questions, inviting students to participate/share more, or sharing their expertise in the field.

Best Practices

Over the years, online instructors have discovered some strategies to set up an engaging discussion or revive a dormant discussion. Following are some strategies from academic pioneers in online learning.

What to Do
  • Be present. Instructor presence (posting to the discussion at least 3 times on 3 separate days of the week) can be a significant determiner of student satisfaction with a course. This can include answering student questions in the discussion forums or asking follow-up questions to expand the discussion.
  • Encourage student opinion and cooperative learning. Provide opportunities for students to critically think or take a stance on positions such as judging or justifying their chosen course of action with their own experiences or research.
  • Focus Discussions. Students identified one key success factor in a course as the instructor’s ability to focus discussions on relevant issues.
  • Provide feedback: Students should be graded on their contribution to the conversation. Consider creating a discussion rubric that focuses on substantive posts and comments on other student entries. Use SpeedGrader to add a score, fill out any rubrics, and add comments for individual students.
What NOT to Do
  • Critique a student’s post in front of other students on a discussion board. Instead, use formative feedback in private comments through Gradebook or when grading the student's discussion using SpeedGrader. When you have positive comments share how the student excelled or the strength of their argument by posting publicly.
  • Let students do all the posting. Be sure to share your knowledge and perspective on the discussion. For instance, at the end of the week summarize the arguments being made and comment in general either by post or with a quick discussion video. If the discussion was a scenario-based question, include what you would have done based on your experience in the field so students can learn from you as well as each other. This demonstrates you’ve read the comments and can give students a solid conclusion to the week which can serve as a teachable moment.

Follow-up Questions

Your job as the instructor will be to provide insight into weekly discussions. This is your opportunity to share your expertise in the field. There are several strategies you can employ when posting in the weekly discussion as an instructor to ignite a lively dialogue  in your virtual classroom.

Start the Discussion: If students are not posting to a discussion consider how the question is phrased, provide additional insight or resources to review or let students know you are looking forward to reading their posts.

Post by Example: Demonstrate how to create a substantive post. Your follow-up posts should exemplify the types of posts you expect from your students. Make the response meaningful and use it as an instructional opportunity. 

Expand the Discussion: Take the conversation to a deeper level by posting follow-up posts to the original discussion question. Below is a reply post to a student’s post and an invitation for other students to join in on this topic:

Example: Great job, Susie! The example of how your previous boss used body language ineffectively was very interesting. Interesting story of what could happen if a person’s words do not match their facial expressions. Studies in nonverbal communication have found that people believe how something is said rather than what is said. I’ve linked an article below on the expectations of leadership and nonverbal communication practices. 

Class, you are welcome to review one of the articles I shared or find one that interests you on your own, and explain what you learned.

Be Mindful of Lonely Student Posts: Look for any students not receiving replies in a discussion. Reply to those students and highlight something important in their posts, share a link to a resource or give examples from your own experiences and invite other participants to comment (as shown above). This strategy gives a student a reply post to respond to while taking the pressure off of him /her to do the follow-up since you are asking anyone to comment.

Reference

Northern Illinois University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. (2012). Classroom discussions. In Instructional guide for university faculty and teaching assistants. Retrieved from https://www.niu.edu/citl/resources/guides/instructional-guide

Additional Resources 

Below are links to Canvas guides that will walk you through how to create, reply to, and grade online discussions.