June 24, 2020 Coaching Discussion Facilitation Coaching: providing a path to find answers, not the answers Mohammad was scared of his upcoming discussion facilitation in class. Part of his fears centered around his language skills. His speaking...
June 17, 2020 Creating Discussion Infrastructures in the Classroom George Wagner invited his colleague Ashley Sackler to visit one of his general education courses to see how he used classroom discussions. Sackler was amazed at what she found. When...
June 10, 2020 Time to Think What can in-person discussions learn from online discussions? Paul was an enigma. He was slow to participate in class discussions. But when he did, his contributions were often quite insightful. It...
June 3, 2020 Clues, Cues, and Queues…in Online Discussions How can we manage the flow, when conversations shift to videoconferencing? "One of the skills you are going to need to develop is to look for discussion participation clues,” Professor Sonja...
May 27, 2020 Prompting Deeper Discussions Herbert Watson was an English professor teaching a course on American poetry when the COVID-19 pandemic closed the campus. Like faculty members across the country, he quickly shifted to remote...
May 20, 2020 Being a Discussion Catalyst The class had broken up into their discussion groups as usual. But what wasn’t usual was the vigor of the discussion from one group. In fact, it was vigorous enough...
May 13, 2020 Ask Follow-Up Questions–and Listen As the saying goes, Ashley wanted to be the “bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” She just had to be the center of attention. When she...
May 8, 2020 Disruption and Positive Transformation It was 1665, and London was virtually shut down due to the Great Plague. Cambridge University sent its students home to study alone. One of those students, Isaac Newton, used...
May 6, 2020 Values-Centered Discussions Greg Jackson was dreading today’s class discussion. As the instructor, he had put together discussion groups with a mix of perspectives on the issues being discussed. While the diversity of...