Building Effective Classroom Discussion

As a teacher watched a video of a classroom discussion she recorded, she kept noticing places where discussion would be on the verge of beginning, only to see it die almost immediately. The students were prepared, and they were often asking the types of questions teachers want them to ask–so why did the discussion keep faltering? She had to start looking at their pedagogy. What she discovered was that they didn’t know how to build on each other’s comments; a student would make a statement that could easily lead to a larger discussion, but no one responded, as if there was nothing else they could say about the comment. The student leading the discussion would then move on to some other topic. This brings to mind the “Yes, and…” idea from improvisational comedy.

The “Yes, and…” idea has been rather popular of late, stemming from a rising interest in improvisational comedy. For those not familiar with the “Yes, and…” idea, it’s almost exactly what it sounds like: in improv, the actors are supposed to accept whatever premise another actor begins with. They say “yes” to the setup, and then try to build on the situation or line of dialogue. Although it sounds as if we do these actions quite naturally when leading discussion, watching the students forced this teacher to realize how seldom teachers adopt this stance in the classroom. Perhaps students falter because they’re not seeing teachers building on student comments.

When we lead discussion, if we’re honest, we often don’t really want discussion. Instead, we want to guide students to an answer that we have thought out beforehand. When talking with students about this problem, one teacher jokingly refers to it as asking teacher questions. The question we ask sounds open-ended, but it really has only one answer, and that’s the answer we need to move the “discussion” to where we want it to go. Thus, the teacher might ask a class, “What word best describes the underground man in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground?” There are countless words students could suggest, but she wants someone to say “hyperconscious” because that’s the discussion she wants to have about the character. But instead of telling students what they want, teachers sometimes ask for examples and then ignore what they suggest in favor of their own response. They can end up pretending they’re including students in the discussion when they really aren’t.

The better approach is to ask the broad question and then follow wherever the student response leads. Perhaps one responds with “spiteful.” To further discussion, you can say “Yes, and…” to that comment and see what else that student or others might say. Instead, many of us graciously say “yes,” rewarding the student for the comment, but then immediately go back to what we really want to talk about, not where the student’s answer has taken us.

Discussion doesn’t falter if we ask follow-up questions that build on the students’ responses. In the class from the video, a student made a comment about gender as performance, giving the example of how boys and girls carry their books in high school. The class wondered whether that behavior was learned or taught. To encourage further discussion, a teacher could ask a number of follow-up questions: Did you ever see any exceptions to that behavior? How was this behavior reinforced? Are there other examples anyone can think of? The teacher could bring the discussion back to the novel and apply the idea there: Where does the main character exhibit such behavior? Are there characters in the book who push back against such an idea? The teacher could also have tried to encourage the students to bring in knowledge from the field or connect such a comment to previous material: How does that example relate to the reading we did about gender and performance?

The students in this case didn’t make these pedagogical moves, and as a result, they missed an opportunity for rich discussion. When teachers focus on their own endpoints, they often miss the same opportunities. Teachers can sometimes disguise a lecture as a discussion, using the students as little more than prompts to guide them to the next idea. If we are willing to say “Yes, and…,” we can give students and ourselves the chance for meaningful discussions, ones where we learn from one another and end up with different but interesting ideas and insights.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services