Discussions with Teachers: Discussion 9 of 15
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Consider how introductions can lead into a productive and welcoming classroom environment. Instead of just asking general questions concerning their name, major, and years at Vanderbilt, ask them questions that are pertinent to the subject and the atmosphere you want to build through the semester.
Here are some examples:. As your students are introducing themselves and you are talking to them, ask your students to comment on the acoustics and remain conscious of how well you can hear and see each of them. Consider, with their input or alone, how you would change and optimize the seating arrangement. At the end of the introductions, ask them to move to optimize communication and make note of unexpected needs for a microphone, lighting changes, seating arrangements or other environmental controls.
How you treat each other and how you and your students feel about being in that place with each other is modeled and influenced by you. Every field has its own exciting research or striking examples, and it is a good idea to present a few of these up front. The teaching challenge is to find special ideas within your own field. Your class will thank you. First Day of Class Print Version The first day of class is your opportunity to present your vision of the class to prospective students.
In making your decision about what information to share, consider how much you want them to know and how much you want to reveal about yourself. Allow the Students to Introduce Themselves This is your opportunity to focus on students as unique and diverse individuals.
Racial–Ethnic and Gender Differences in Parents’ and Students’ Relationships With Teachers
Here are some examples: In a geography or history class, you may want to ask students to introduce themselves and explain where they are from. You could mark these places on a map of the world as they talk. In a math class, you may want to ask the students to introduce themselves and state one way mathematics enriches their lives every day. You may also want to have the students break into pairs, exchange information, and introduce one another to the class.
The Background Knowledge Probe is a short, simple questionnaire given to students at the start of a course, or before the introduction of a new unit, lesson or topic.
First Day of Class
Discuss and Evaluate the Room Environment Together As your students are introducing themselves and you are talking to them, ask your students to comment on the acoustics and remain conscious of how well you can hear and see each of them. When high school English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling introduced this strategy in the featured video click Pinwheel Discussion above , she used it as a device for talking about literature, where each group represented a different author, plus one provocateur group. Students prepare by reading a text or group of texts and writing some higher-order discussion questions about the text.
From there, students continue the conversation, prompting one another to support their claims with textual evidence. There is no particular order to how students speak, but they are encouraged to respectfully share the floor with others. Discussion is meant to happen naturally and students do not need to raise their hands to speak. This overview of Socratic Seminar from the website Facing History and Ourselves provides a list of appropriate questions, plus more information about how to prepare for a seminar.
If students are beginners, the teacher may write the discussion questions, or the question creation can be a joint effort. Some teachers have students do much of this exercise—recording their ideas and arranging them into categories— without talking at first. Often, this activity serves as a good pre-writing exercise, after which students will write some kind of analysis or position paper. Students form two circles, one inside circle and one outside circle. The teacher poses a question to the whole group and pairs discuss their responses with each other.
Then the teacher signals students to rotate: Students on the outside circle move one space to the right so they are standing in front of a new person or sitting, as they are in the video. Now the teacher poses a new question, and the process is repeated. Instead of two circles, students could also form two straight lines facing one another. Some teachers use this strategy to have students teach one piece of content to their fellow students, making it less of a discussion strategy and more of a peer teaching format.
In fact, many of these protocols could be used for peer teaching as well. Students are placed into a few groups of students each and are given a discussion question to talk about. After sufficient time has passed for the discussion to develop, one or two students from each group rotate to a different group, while the other group members remain where they are. For the next rotation, students who have not rotated before may be chosen to move, resulting in groups that are continually evolving.
Two students sit facing each other in the center of the room; the remaining students sit in a circle around them. Students on the outside observe, take notes, or perform some other discussion-related task assigned by the teacher. One student assumes the role of a book character, significant figure in history, or concept such as a tornado, an animal, or the Titanic.
In another variation, several students could form a panel of different characters, taking questions from the class all together and interacting with one another like guests on a TV talk show. Students begin in pairs, responding to a discussion question only with a single partner. Pairs share their ideas with the pair they just joined. Next, groups of four join together to form groups of eight, and so on, until the whole class is joined up in one large discussion. With a tool like Voxer , those limitations disappear. Voxer is also invaluable for collaborating on projects and for having one-on-one discussions with students, parents, and your own colleagues.
Like many other educators, Peter DeWitt took a while to really understand the potential of Voxer, but in this EdWeek piece , he explains what turned him around. The first time I saw a backchannel in action was at my first unconference: While those of us in the audience listened to presenters and watched a few short video clips, a separate screen was up beside the main screen, projecting something called TodaysMeet.
Evaluation of Teaching and Learning 33—38 Chapter 6: Thank you so much. Consider using slides, videos, films, CD-ROMs, and computer simulations to enhance presentations, but remember that:. I was only aware of few strategies like think-pair-share. Our findings suggest that an increased focus on helping teachers connect with students and their parents is one means of helping children at risk for academic failure get off to a good start in school. If you want to encourage a particular form of student participation, make clear your expectations, the reasons for them, and how students' learning will benefit. If possible, I ask for suggested answers or for a vote among the possibilities.
It looked a lot like those chat rooms from back in the day, basically a blank screen where people would contribute a few lines of text, the lines stacking up one after the other, no other bells or whistles. Anyone in the room could participate in this conversation on their phone, laptop, or tablet, asking questions, offering commentary, and sharing links to related resources without ever interrupting the flow of the presentations. Talk moves are sentence frames we supply to our students that help them express ideas and interact with one another in respectful, academically appropriate ways.
Talk moves can be incorporated into any of the other discussion formats listed here. Next, the teacher says Teach! Although WBT is most popular in elementary schools, this featured video shows the creator of WBT, Chris Biffle, using it quite successfully with college students. An oldie but a goodie, think-pair-share can be used any time you want to plug interactivity into a lesson: Simply have students think about their response to a question, form a pair with another person, discuss their response, then share it with the larger group.
So what else do you have? These are some great strategies. Not a lot applies to the virtual classroom in science. The online, live classroom is similar to a discussion board. Students talk to each other as well as to the teacher. They can ask questions in the moment and not wait to raise their hand. They can ask privately to each other or the teacher. This is similar to the Backchannel discussion. The class activity is happening alongside the chat discussion. The Teach-Okay is a great strategy and can apply to all kinds of classrooms.
This is a great teach-reteach method that helps to identify in-the-moment misconceptions and provides students the opportunity to help each other in a very positive way. I agree Dorothy about some of the types of activities described. Have you heard of the Harkness Discussion method? It has helped my ELLs develop critical thinking skills and strengthen their communication skills. Because language is a social experience, using the Harkness Discussion is one of the most effective methods to help ELLs develop their literacy skills. I wrote about it here AND referenced this page in my article, Jen.
I think this is the correct thread: Thank you for this! New pedagogy is not better pedagogy. Just try teaching with good questions and leave the unnecessary games for grade school students. God, do professors infantilize their students these days! And i assume your students always respond fashionably to your greatly worded questions.
Why debate when jeopardy…. Your podcast is no longer refreshing in my Podcasts app. I thought you had taken a break since April! It makes it much harder to find what I want. I wish I knew what was going on or how to help you. If you are on Twitter you may want to send the question out with the hashtag podcastPD and see if anyone has ideas. You can also tag me cultofpedagogy and I can retweet it for you to try and reach more people. I just found this: Jennifer, your article is so inspiring.
The thinking routine that we do well in my class are the Gallery walk and the Speed dating we call it donut talk. Thank you for sharing your ideas. That is a fantastic name! So some time has passed since you posted this comment…did you end up trying one of these strategies? How did it go? That sounds great, Tian. Just that little tweak will force you to make more specific plans. I would love to hear how it goes for you. What a great list of classroom discussion strategies! It looks a lot like Voxer! One of my favorites for empowering students is the Harkness Method, named after a teacher at Exeter Academy where it has been used for years.
There are plenty of resources for it on the web. Thanks for reminding me! Harkness Discussion has been an anchor in my class and like Peter said has empowered students to be accountable for not what they talk about but how they speak with one another. I plan to use it in my college classroom this fall! Check it out at http: I was here to steal some good ideas for my own classes, but it was really nice to stumble across this shout out!
Teaching in a Harkness school more than ten years ago led me to develop Spider Web Discussion, and I still am amazed by its power to transform kids into learning leaders. I wanted to start SWD. The students in my school are so grade focused. Here is a detailed essay on Harkness pedagogy, its historical roots, and philosophical underpinnings.
Thank you for the wonderful list of strategies! Jess, thanks for sharing this! I found this article that provides an overview, and it looks like a fantastic format: Having a class discussion in Mathematics class can be challenging. Students who are not comfortable with Mathematics are not likely to speak up. If you force students to stand and deliver, it can lead to feelings of embarrassment, shame and unnecessary discomfort. So in my search to find new ways to have students discussing Mathematics in Mathematics class I happened upon this podcast.
I planned a lesson with a hybrid of the Gallery Walk and Concentric Circles. The class I choose was a small class of 12 students. I established six stations, each with a different Mathematics question and I held a number of questions in abeyance anticipating that students would complete questions at some of the stations. So now the student who had arrived at that station in the first rotation was left to explain to the new arrival.
If a pair finished a question correctly, then a new question was placed at that station for the students to work on. As anticipated there were questions that were completed, so having extra questions prepared was critical to the continuity of the work. During the course of the class there was a lot of discussion and interaction taking place between the pairs.
First Day of Class | Center for Teaching | Vanderbilt University
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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies
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Discussions With Teachers Discussion 9 of 15 Discussion held r " ' in Stuttgart, Germany _ ' \ on August 30, §~n-I5 IED WORKS OF RUDOLF STEINER. Here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more I was pretty sure that We will discuss actually meant the teacher would do most of the talking; He .. May 9,
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