When faculty members sit down and discuss problems in teaching, one of the biggest headaches seems to be how to stimulate discussion in classes and seminars. How can students be expected to come up with beautifully framed analyses of the readings you’ve assigned for discussion on the spot, without basing their contributions entirely on their own experiences and opinions?
This problem occurs whether you're teaching a freshman seminar, an upper-division small lecture course, or an intensive graduate seminar. Unfamiliarity with assigned topics doesn’t decrease with academic level; the readings simply become more specialized. In any given class, some students are inclined to feel uncertain about the point of the readings or the nuances of argument and evidence that they might be expected to identify.
One way to guide and stimulate discussion at the same time is to include some very brief perspective to which students can also react: a few paragraphs on the historical, cultural, or scientific context of the work, or a contemporary’s comment on it. To help students understand, for example, why Darwin’s voyage on H.M.S. Beagle was so important, I often provide a couple of short essays about why he was on the ship to begin with, and why that was so unusual.
Another way to stimulate discussion is to assign a brief writing assignment with a reading. The assignment should give the students an idea of why you assigned the reading, what’s important about the subject or approach that the reading takes, and what you’re looking for in their responses to it. Their essay need not be long, or a perfect jewel, but tell them that you might collect the papers so that you can see how they’re thinking about things. A paragraph or a page is plenty. And it’s important to direct the writing, not merely to ask students to jot down their impressions.
For example, if students are reading an account of the Battle of Gettysburg, you might ask them to contrast the motivations and objectives of one of the principal officers on each side. In discussion section, questions about which officers the students chose may be just as interesting as identifying and interpreting the officers’ motivations. If you were assigning Watson and Crick’s landmark paper that identified DNA as the genetic material, you might ask exactly what they pointed out that was not known before, and to what extent they realized the implications of their paper.
Short writing assignments crystallize concepts for the student and the teacher. Clear writing, of course, requires clear thinking, and forcing one’s thoughts onto paper—even for a very short assignment—soon clears away cobwebs. It also helps students to identify what they don’t understand, and you should feel free to tell them that this is a legitimate and important part of their writing. As an instructor, you might feel more comfortable calling on those quiet students in class, because they’ll come in with a prepared text, so there’s no excuse for lack of participation. This will give you a better sense of how they’re doing in class when it comes time to assign grades. And, if you collect the assignments and look them over briefly, you’ll find things that didn’t come out in class that you can encourage next time, questions that weren’t raised but that you can address quickly, and problems with initial understanding that you can follow up with the students later.
Kevin Padian (Integrative Biology)
Originally Published: Volume 2 – Number 1 (Spring 2001)