Cultivating Deep Understanding Through Student-Centered Discussion
Daniel Rickabus
Grand Valley State University – GTC Program
19 March 2023
Through the practice and process of my teacher-education, I’ve gravitated strongly toward the idea that real deep meaning is made in learning from student-centered, collaborative, inquiry-based discussion. In my personal life as an adult, I’ve always felt like the ongoing conversations where my friends and I are processing what we are experiencing in life out loud yield such a lasting impact and end up being formative to our growth. The same goes for my many experiences collaborating with diverse small groups of people on music recording and songwriting projects. There is a phrase I lean on during these creative endeavors, which is that in true collaboration, we don’t necessarily want our idea to win, we want the best idea to win. That process of balancing asserting and relenting, speaking, and listening, always forges the best outcome in my humble view. We humans are social animals at our core, and I believe we need reflection and validation of our thoughts with community to truly internalize learning. This personal philosophy of teaching served as a key motivator in addressing a classroom issue through the framework of action research. Does moving instruction away from simply reading and writing toward a rich incorporation of collaborative student-led discussion create deeper and more lasting understanding of learning?
Back in November, my mentor teacher at City High School in Grand Rapids, Mark VanGoor, expressed a desire for students to do more active, in-the-moment, out-loud working together on assignments rather than simply reading or watching historical information and writing about it. Mark and I teach three sections of Junior History of the Americas, two sections of Senior History of the Americas, and one Junior Global Politics course. The issue of creating deep, lasting understanding of the material that sticks in memory is vital to what the International Baccalaureate Program expects of students in these social studies discipline subjects. This is precisely because of how they are assessed: through hand-written, timed essays where students are expected to have memorized detailed evidence that they can utilize to support an argument. One they pick a stance in response to a prompt, and then craft an effective thesis, a vast majority of the content of their essays is expected to be specific, factual, historical information that builds a case to support their argument.
During lesson planning, Mark has always been good at asking the two of us collectively, “what are we going to have them do with the information?” His main concern is always creating tangible deep understanding of the learning with students. He has a phrase that he has repeated throughout mentoring me in lesson delivery. “With history,” he always says, “they can either read it, or watch it, or we can tell it to them.” This is an expression of the limitations we face in delivering the information, and it plays into the process of them having them do some activity with that information to internalize understanding. One fantastic exercise Mark has always employed is drawing concepts on whiteboards as a group. Students share the memorable and often funny experience of depicting a historical event or thematic concept via dry erase markers, and this often helps them remembers important details. However, often we found that our lesson plans were reverting back to old patterns and involving acts of reading material, highlighting it or annotating it, and then writing responses to IB-style inquiry prompts. Surely, they need practice with writing to pass their IB essay exams at the end of senior year, but does this have to be the way they learn?
I’ll never forget a moment of epiphany I had regarding student discussion and its effectiveness to create engagement toward the end of my first unit teaching the Junior History of the Americas course. To dig into the Cuban Missile Crisis through a lens of historical context, Mark and I developed a role-play simulation discussion activity where students would debate what to do had they been in the presidential situation room during the crisis. Students were given character sheets and instructed to study up on their characters. One student in each small group of four was President Kennedy, whose job was to make the final decision about how to avoid total annihilation through mutually assured destruction. Each of the other three students portrayed real historical advisers, and attempted to convince Kennedy of either the military option, the economic blockade option, or the diplomatic option respectively. That day was the first time I saw that not one single student was disengaged. The combination of a student-led small group debate, and the added enjoyment of having to portray a character motivated every last student to become enthusiastically involved. That day had a powerful impact on my teaching approach that not only inspired this action research experiment, but also my teaching style as a whole for the future.
In one of the interviews that I conducted for this experiment, a junior history student who we will refer to as Drew gave a rather alarming response when asked, “what does it feel like to only ever read and write for learning, and never discuss it with your classmates?” “It makes me feel like a robot,” Drew said. “It makes me feel like I’m supposed to just be a ‘learning machine.’” This immediately rang a bell in my mind, resonating with one of my favorite educational theory videos that had been presented to us in our teacher-education program. In a DVD lecture filmed in 2009, theorist Alfie Kohn made this poignant point while refuting the “mechanized model” of teaching material that manifests from the normalized use of individually completed, rigid homework assignments. “What must we be assuming about learning, or about children,” Kohn asked, “to believe that their attitudes about what they are doing are irrelevant? Are we assuming that kids are like vending machines - that you put in an assignment, and you get out learning?” (Kohn, 2009). This connection highlights the need to make learning feel like a more human process; one that is vital and alive in its process in community with other learners, rather than one that feels mechanized.
I believe that collaborative, inquiry-oriented discussion is one wonderful way to achieve this aim. A more “humanized” process of learning is not only more effective for internalization and memorization of historical events and themes, but also what today’s students deserve. “Teachers need to be equipped with knowledge and competencies for humanizing learning– addressing diversity, empathy, pedagogical strategies, and agency” (Gleason & Cherrez, 2021, p.348). Diversity is honored when each student of every background has an equal voice in constructing meaning from a lesson. Empathy is fostered when students express their own, unique renditions of what the learning means to them. Agency is cultivated when students are empowered to build their own piece of the learning puzzle through open collaboration.
So much of successful learning, as well as effective classroom management, comes down to relationship building. In her book Socratic Classroom: Reflective Thinking Through Collaborative Inquiry, Sarah Davey Chesters adeptly describes “…what Bohm calls an ‘impersonal fellowship’, which is a trust and openness, regardless of not sharing any history or experiences together (Bohm, 1996; Reeve, 2005),” (Chesters, 2012, p.66). This act of building fellowship not only promotes a positive and cooperative classroom environment, it also creates more effective, shared learning. Chesters goes on to “…describe the experience of collaborative dialogue wherein the participants are engaged in the process not the content of thought in order to overcome their perceived blocks or limitations. They suspend their assumptions, judgments, and values, and enter into a dialogue and the flow of meaning so that the group can move away from an emphasis on the individual aspects of ego to a group process,” (Chesters, 2012, p.67). That process of moving away from ego-centered dialogue centers the content of the learning rather than the personalities of the learners. Utilizing their listening skills, participants can “…attentively and collaboratively create something new or innovative from the views shared by the group,” (Chesters, 2012, p.66).
By co-creating the meaning of learning, students are participating in a mode of building knowledge that resonates with how we are meant to learn. The term “constructivism” has been seen more and more frequently in the ongoing academic conversation on learning, and for good reason, “Learning is typically not an individual process,” education scholar Mark E Henze asserts. “Thanks to the ability to communicate, we are able to (and do) adopt much of the learning of those who came before. In other words, we build (hence the word construct) on the learning of others” (Henze, 2009, p.88-89).
Given all of this evidence to support my beliefs, I proposed a plan for action research that Mark wholeheartedly approved. Simply put, our plan was to gear lesson plan documents more and more toward group collaborative discussion, but to do so in a way that we could clearly measure the results. We decided on three separate ways that I would accumulate data and measure the impact of discussion-based learning. The most important measurement, in my view, comes from our decision to end our unit for the three Junior History classes on the Vietnam war with an I.B. Paper-2-style handwritten essay responding to a complex prompt question. Students were given the prompts ahead of time so that they could prepare, but they would be unable to use their notes, laptops, or any other resources while hand-writing the essay based on what was in their minds alone. I graded all 64 essays myself, and as I did, I collected notes on the facts that students included to support their arguments in their writing. My intention was to see how much of the evidential information they internalized and then recalled from memory was from the lessons that were based in class discussion. Secondly, I kept close records of the Junior students’ grades over a two-week collection period, and homed in on which lessons incited better performances, the discussion-oriented ones or the reading-and-writing-focused ones. Thirdly, I interviewed Senior students, now in their second year of the History of the Americas course, to see from their perspective which type of learning they prefer, and which type helped them on their mid-year Internal Assessment essays. Finally, I performed a sort of in-the-moment experiment with the Junior Global Politics class, deterring from my original lesson plan to let an entirely student-guided inquiry conversation take up a whole class period, observing the levels of engagement in the process.
As we planned the unit on the Vietnam war for the Juniors, we began to strategically, yet gradually, make a majority of assignments discussion-oriented assignments, leaving less and less assignments based on writing and reading alone. The results evidenced in their hand-written unit-ending essay assessment were astounding. Students were given four prompts to choose from, and by far, the most chosen prompt was one addressing the television’s impact on the US homefront being the deciding factor in US failure in the war. This was a massive topic of student-led discussion, so this was already telling. The prompt read, “ ‘The outcome of the Vietnam War was decided not on the battlefield, but on the television screen.’ To what extent to you agree with this statement?” Thirty-three of the sixty-four juniors chose this prompt given a choice of four different prompts. One lesson from the unit that was almost entirely delivered through a long student-centered discussion was on the Tet Offensive, and how the power of the media and what parts of Tet they showed changed the opinion of the war at home. Almost every single essay based on this prompt referenced the Tet Offensive. A vast majority (28 students) chose to argue in agreement with this claim. By contrast, only five students argued by refuting the claim. This is important to our results because the evidence that they would need to argue that the outcome of the war was based on the battlefield was delivered in a lesson based solely on reading and writing which covered battle tactics and casualty statistics.
One of our most intensely involved student-led conversations in class revolved around the famous photo of the North Vietnamese soldier being executed in the streets that became a driving force of the anti-war movement. Students debated whether showing the photo was the right thing for the newspapers to do, and they uncovered themselves how there was not enough context presented with the photo. The man, wearing civilian clothing, had, in reality, just committed a heinous war crime only hours before the photo of his killing was taken. However, the lack of context led the American people to feel like they were supporting a gruesome and inhumane war effort. Of the thirty-three students who answered the prompt about the media, thirty of them analyzed the conversation about the North Vietnamese soldier in plain clothes being executed. By contrast, and example that was provided of the VVAW veterans throwing back their medals to the White House in protest, which was shown via documentary footage and then written about without discussion was only referenced in nine essays.
This process of systematically including discussion-heavy assignments also allowed us to see how impact was directly represented by their grades. In the two-week data collection period during the Unit 4: Vietnam unit, we went from assignment 4.1 to 4.12. Lessons 4.2, 4.4, 4.5 and 4.9 were heavy on reading and writing without inciting discussion, while the other seven lessons were based on in depth conversation. As further evidence to prove my hypothesis, it turned out that 42 of the 64 Juniors got on average better scores on the assignments where discussion was involved. Their scores were still based on their answers they had written on their google documents, but it was clear that their answers were better, more thoroughly fleshed out, and more critically analytical on assignments where either the small table groups or the full class engaged in conversation to make meaning of the material.
In addition to the analysis of the results of the Junior History course, I thought I would interview seven of the senior students about their experiences with discussion outside of the classroom during a period of quiet individual work. Out of the seven seniors who all spoke with me individually, five of them reported that they felt they gained a deeper understanding of the material that lasted with them enough to work into essays from memory when lessons were delivered through student-centered discussion. Many of these folks echoed similar sentiments to one another, that they felt hearing other students’ perspectives helped them solidify their own perspectives enough to argue them, which helped them internalize the details. One young woman who we will call Megan depicted having visual memories of student-to-student discussions while taking her Internal Assessment exam, which helped her to remember what they were debating. Of the two students who did not report that their own participation in discussions helped them develop deep understanding, one of them described their personality as introverted. She related that although she didn’t participate in the discussions herself, the discussions happening around her influenced what she wrote on her assignments.
The final experiment of this action research investigation took place during 1st hour Global Politics for the Junior-aged students. I had written a lesson plan that was meant to start our new unit on Human Rights. The lesson began with a student-centered discussion, then moved on to a number of activities where students could begin analyzing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The conversation was based around the compelling inquiry questions, “what is a human right?” “what should be a human right?” and “why aren’t human rights well enforced?” Although I initially intended this discussion to span 15 minutes, I was elated by student involvement and let it continue on for the full 50 minutes of class. At one point, I tried a new questioning technique that I am now quite fond of. The students themselves created better and better questions verbally, with one intellectually thought-provoking question leading to another. Eleven out of the sixteen Global Politics students raised their hands to voluntarily participate in the discussion without being called on. When one particular question was raised, I asked students to turn inward to their smaller 4-person table groups to discuss. As they did this, I walked around with a small whiteboard and took notes on what they were saying. Then, once they seemed to reach a certain tipping point in each of their discussions, I brought the whole class back together, and used my notes to prompt them to answer specific questions based on points I had heard them make. Asking students to recount their points made in small group to the whole class served to be a motivating, confidence building exercise. Although this part of the experiment didn’t collect any precise data to analyze, it was important for me to mention just based on the qualitative results. Leaning into keeping the discussion as the focus of the class period while discussion was good just further proved to me that this level of engagement benefits students’ internalization of deep understanding. I ended up making a brief speech about how so much of learning is about finding better questions to ask, rather than always seeking answers.
In conclusion, the results of this action research project definitely reinforced the belief I already had in the value of student-led, constructivist, collaborative, deliberative discussion. My aim is to make the class feel more and more like this Global Politics class mentioned above as much as possible. Additionally, I’m very curious to plan more official Socratic Seminar style lessons with two groups of students alternating in inner and outer circles. I would love to do this type of research again, especially in a more detailed way with their essays, to further solidify this reasoning. I came away believing more than ever that meaning is made in learning from sharing building of understanding of complex, nuanced historical material. Humanizing learning and making it a community effort also creates a sense of connection that in turn drives engagement even higher.
References
Chesters, S. D. (2012). Socratic pedagogy and classroom practice. In S. D. Chesters (Ed.), The
Socratic Classroom: Reflective Thinking Through Collaborative Inquiry (pp. 41–74). SensePublishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6091-855-1_3
Gleason, B., & Jaramillo Cherrez, N. (2021). Design thinking approach to global collaboration
and empowered learning: Virtual exchange as innovation in a teacher education course. TechTrends: Linking Research and Practice to Improve Learning: A Publication of the Association for Educational Communications & Technology, 65(3), 348–358. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-020-00573-6
Henze, M. E. (2009). Demystifying “constructivism”: Teasing unnecessary baggage from useful
pedagogy. Christian Education Journal, 6(1), 87–111. https://ezproxy.gvsu.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,sso&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001714775&site=eds-live&scope=site
Kohn, A. (2009). No Grades + No Homework = Better Learning: Two Lectures by Alfie
Kohn [DVD]. Clip: “Are Kids Like Vending Machines?” via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=alfie+kohn+homework