Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021
Technique 46: Disciplined discussion
Building ratio through discussion
An effective discussion needs a shared purpose—on two levels. It needs a specific topic participants tacitly agree to discuss, and it needs a shared mental model of what it means to discuss something. If people are just trying to prove they are right, it's a debate. Discussion should involve some reflection along the lines of, what have I, or we, learned here? And a discussion is often better if it's cohesive. “If you chase five rabbits you catch none,” a friend of mine says, meaning that if you try to talk about everything, you resolve nothing.
With that in mind, here's a key moment from a discussion in Rue Ratray's English class, taped when he taught at Edward Brooke Charter School in Boston. The discussion was about Lois Lowry's novel The Giver, specifically the relationship of individuals to authority. The community was very accepting of government dictates, students observed. Then a student named Sofia commented that Jonas was an exception. He was “not willing to accept or agree with the ideas of the government.” Rue called on another student, Khalid, but Khalid suddenly shifted the subject.
“Carol and I talked about how we liked this phrase that …”
“Wait a minute, Khalid,” Rue enjoined. “What do you think about what Sofia said?”
When Rue redirected Khalid before he could share his idea, he risked disrupting his train of thought. He might forget what he had been about to say. Why do that? The reason is that Rue's eye was on the long game—he was reminding Khalid that a comment too disconnected from the previous comment or topic detracted from discussion even if it was interesting to him. Rue was teaching students a critical aspect of having a successful discussion by reminding them of the self-discipline necessary to discussion. Effective contributors to a discussion recognize when changing the subject detracts from the overall conversation. Giving students the opportunity to practice the skills of discussion means supporting them as they develop this meta-awareness.
Unfortunately, in many classrooms, the moment when someone finishes a thought means it's open season; there's no expectation that the next comment will stick with the same topic and the result is conversations that have a fractured and scattered feel. In fact, students will often say, “What I was going to talk about was …” which implies that they are changing the topic (and that the previous comment was relatively unremarkable). Do this enough and you prevent the substance and depth that come from wrestling with the nuances of a specific issue. And it suggests to previous speakers that their comments weren't worth making. Why keep contributing if you say something you've been thinking about and it's ignored by the next speaker as if it never happened? It's easily overlooked, in other words, that one of the most important characteristics of a good discussion is topicality.
Ryan Miller used a similar move in a recent lesson. Students were examining primary source documents about President Teddy Roosevelt's intervention in Panama. One student commented that Roosevelt's claims that the United States was not involved were an effort to hide the government's intentions. The subsequent student made a sudden change of topic, almost as if the previous point had never been made, so Ryan stepped in: “That's interesting, but I'd like to hear someone respond to Sara's comment before we move on to another one.”
Ryan’s and Rue's goal in these interventions was to have students internalize a mental model of discussion that includes self-discipline and a recognition of the need to read one's audience among participants. In a good discussion people don't just talk about anything they want at any time.
This is an example of what I call managing the meta, the first part of the technique Disciplined Discussion, which encourages focus and self-awareness in discussion. That sometimes requires keeping a discussion “inside the box,” and reminding students “Let's stay on our original topic right now” or asking, “How is this connected to the topic at hand?”
The second part of Disciplined Discussions is intentional reflection, an adaptation of stamping, a term Paul Bambrick-Santoyo uses to describe writing after a discussion in which participants summarize key ideas or, in this case, reflect deliberately on questions like: “What did I (or we) learn from our discussion?” or “How did your opinions change?” Writing about these topics gives them importance and permanence and ensures that time spent in discussion isn't wasted. As Paul Kirscher and colleagues remind us, learning is a change in long-term memory. The discussion may be rich but unless students remember it, they won't have learned much. Writing helps bridge that gap.
The more time you spend in discussion, the more important it is to make sure that clear takeaways are framed and the process of encoding them in long-term memory is begun. Intentional reflection means a discussion doesn't just end with the teacher saying it's over. It ends with the teacher saying something like:
· “Take a minute to jot down your takeaways from the discussion.”
· Or (to emphasize listening a bit more): “Take a minute to jot down a summary of some of the more useful comments from your peers.”
· Or (to emphasize openness to new ideas): “Take a minute to jot down the ways your perspective changed in the course of the discussion.”
This would also be a great occasional application of Art of the Sentence (technique 41):
· “Great discussion. Two minutes now to capture your most important takeaway in one carefully crafted sentence.”
· Or, “Great discussion. Two minutes to capture the two differing points of view we heard in one complete sentence.”
Of course you don't have to be a purist about using Art of the Sentence. Silent Solo could suffice. “Two minutes to capture the three key historical events we discussed and how they were connected. Go!”
I prefer writing over Turn and Talk, though. Writing encodes ideas more deeply in memory—we remember what we think about, Daniel Willingham tells us, and writing is usually a harder form of thinking than talking. Plus it leaves students with a written record they can refer back to.
Interestingly, in her Keystone, Arielle Hoo concludes her class discussion of parallel overlapping lines with a written summary, but she makes it a shared class activity. She provides a sentence starter and various students contribute ideas. She refines and selects from among them, creating a summary that is superior in content to what any single student could have created. Students then copy this down as their record of the proceedings. My team and I call this sort of written summary—one that’s both a shared creation and curated by the teacher, one that results in an exemplar of higher quality than any individual might produce—a Collectively Worked Example. It's a great way to end a class.
Managing the Meta—The Case for Inside the Box
We tend to valorize “thinking outside the box.” The phrase evokes creativity, cognitive leaps, and the raw stuff of insight. In classroom discussion, however, keeping it inside the box—staying focused on a specific topic, maintaining steady, deep reflection on all sides of an idea—is often more valuable. Of course, the two aren't mutually exclusive, but there is a certain tension between them. Students sometimes reach for comments that are far afield rather than focused and topical because they believe that's how “outside the box” happens. We sometimes even encourage their doing so. Still, if we don't teach students how to keep insights on topic, we are guaranteed great leaps sideways, occasionally at the expense of forward progress. Let me give you an example.
I spent some time observing classes in a school near me, and one of the things that struck me was the way the discussions differed among classrooms. In some, students made relevant and insightful contributions. In others, comments were interesting to the student who made them, but not as useful or thought-provoking to others. They were arcane and solipsistic—smart, perhaps, but so self-absorbed that it was hard to say. The curious thing is that I was observing the same group of students in different rooms. I started to wonder, “Why were they so alert to their peers' perspective in one class and the opposite in another?”
In one classroom, the teacher asked, “What is fairness?” One student answered with an obscure quotation from a comic book that no one else had heard of. Another replied that it was like pizza. They veered from one obscure analogy to another. They were certainly outside the box. The teacher too made obscure connections. The text they were reading was like “that commercial on TV.” Then it was “like that song,” and he quoted some lyrics. He called these text-to-text connections, but they weren't. Their effect was not to cast the text in a new and revealing light but to distract the class from any sustained reflection on it. Student comments mirrored his choices. They referred to something arcane or comprehensible only to them and he never helped them think about how useful their comments were to others. Perhaps his mental model was vague and he didn't envision discussions as being characterized by comments that were topical and timely. I once had a professor who would occasionally respond to comments, “How does that relate to what we were just talking about?” His doing so helped us see very quickly that discussion was not just about us and our desire to talk about what thoughts were on our minds, but about the mutual goal of developing shared insight on a topic.
The power of framing expectations about discussion was evident in the math class many of the same students had been in earlier in the day. It was their first day studying rate of change, and their teacher had just observed that time was almost always an independent variable when it appeared in a rate-of-change problem. “It's going to be your independent variable 99 percent of the time,” he said. He asked students if they had any questions. Several ensued in which students reflected on how certain rate-of-change problems would be represented on a line graph. Then a student asked for an example of a situation in which time could be the dependent variable, and the teacher said, “To think of an example, I'd have to come up with something pretty obscure. Maybe we'll do that later, but for now let's just assume it's going to be the independent variable.”
Despite his hint, another student raised her hand and began brainstorming “what ifs,” wondering aloud how time might become a dependent variable. It was great that she was asking herself this question, and although many teachers might have encouraged it, her comment was less useful to others in the room. The teacher was trying to help the class come to a collective understanding of rate of change at a conceptual level, not to digress into an area he'd just indicated was not worth the time. His response was brilliant: “You're thinking outside the box. But I want us to focus on thinking inside the box right now, on really understanding rate of change, what it is and how it works. So let's stay there right now.” Then he smiled genuinely and sincerely and they went back to talking about rate of change.
Although some teachers might be reluctant to circumscribe discussion in this way, his doing so was immensely productive. Essentially he said, “Here's what we're doing as a group right now. That's something you should pay attention to when you speak up—what the group is trying to do and why.” Part of a teacher's responsibility is to teach students when and how to participate productively in a discussion.
In short, you manage the meta when, through feedback and modeling, you guide students in the dynamics of building conversation, specifically how to make the kinds of comments that are most productive in a given setting. Rather than assuming they know how to make a discussion valuable, you invest in teaching them as they struggle forward. Perhaps there are times when you want more outside the box. If that's the case, you might use meta comments like, “I want to hear some people who are willing to make some broader connections.” Either way, managing the meta relies on two key tools: modeling the kind of participation you want in a discussion and providing constant supportive feedback on how to engage your peers in a meaningful, connected, and mutually productive way.