Assignment Preparation and Debrief

Well-suited for:

• Practicing clearly communicating ethical claims and arguments in speech.

• Practicing respectfully and effectively discussing ethical issues.

Strengths

• Practices multiple ethical reasoning skills at once in a low-stakes setting. Presenting a paper requires organizing an ethical argument, identifying and communicating important points in a concise fashion, listening to and processing questions and feedback, and developing ethical views with peers. In-section presentations provide an opportunity to practice these skills in a setting that allows for error and support, without significant academic or social costs.

• Encourages good writing practices. By forcing students to establish the basic elements of their paper ahead of time and process feedback, paper presentations can have the added bonus of encouraging students to begin their paperwork early and think of writing as a process.

• Great for final papers. Paper Presentations works best if students have already put in substantive preparatory work on their papers (and paper presentations can be part of that work). As such, the Paper Presentation format is best-suited to larger writing assignments like final or term papers.

Potential Challenges and Solutions

• Students are hesitant to ask questions or provide feedback to other students. Students can feel uncomfortable being critical of fellow students or can find it difficult to respond to new arguments on the fly.

  • Model questions and feedback. After allowing time for other students to respond first, raise questions or provide feedback to students yourself.

  • Provide example responses. Ahead of presentations, create some generic clarifying questions or points of constructive criticism exemplifying the kind of responses you expect, and share these with students at the start of section.

• There is not enough time for all students to present. Even with short presentations, it can be difficult to find time for all students to present.

  • Reserve a section for presentations.

  • Break students into smaller groups and have them present to their groups.

Well-suited for:

• Practice understanding and responding to feedback.

• Practicing respectfully and effectively discussing ethical issues.

Strengths

• Encourages openness about the writing process. Getting feedback and relying on others’ insight to work through confusion, as well as respectfully providing that feedback and insight to others, is a critical aspect of doing good writing work (and doing good academic work in general). Having students discuss and practice responding to feedback in a group setting can provide a low-stakes opportunity to get comfortable with the vulnerability that comes with giving and receiving such feedback and insight.

• Encourages students to look beyond the grade. By dedicating substantial section time to students, you structurally signal to students that written comments and feedback is just as important (if not more so) than the grade they recieved.

• Great for learning from early papers. Students, especially students new to your discipline, can feel intimidated and discouraged trying to work their way through discipline-specific writing norms and expectations. A Group Feedback Discussion held shortly after an early set of papers have been returned can help students better process feedback they have received and draw out lessons they can use for future writing assignments and exercises.

Potential Challenges and Solutions

• Students are uncomfortable sharing feedback with other students. Sharing feedback with one’s peers can be quite stressful, especially if one feels that feedback was critical or negative.

  • Meet with students ahead of section. Let students know about the plan to hold Group Feedback Discussions well ahead of time, and invite them to come and meet with you privately about any concerns (about the feedback itself or about sharing it with other students). Such meetings not only give you an opportunity to work with students to find a way of sharing feedback they are comfortable with, but also gives you an additional opportunity to clarify and discuss your feedback with the student.

  • Have students select specific pieces of feedback to share. This will allow students to not only avoid discussing assignment problems they are more uncomfortable sharing, but also pushes students to prioritize issues with their writing.

• Students don’t understand some piece of feedback. Sometimes in the process of discussing, or preparing to discuss, feedback with others, students will realize they aren’t actually sure what some specific item of feedback means.

  • “Float” between groups and provide clarification as needed. Encourage students to call you over if and when confusions arise, and be ready to work with the small groups to arrive at a better understanding of what the relevant piece of feedback means. If you are the one who gave the feedback, doing so has the added advantage of creating more classroom openness: just as you are asking students to be open about issues in their writing, you are being open about your feedback.

  • Meet with students ahead of section. Not only can (as suggested above), pre-section meetings provide an opportunity to attend to student concerns about publicly sharing feedback, but it can also provide you an opportunity to discuss the feedback and address any points of confusion before they come up in section discussions.

Well-suited for:

• Defending or critiquing a particular claim or choice.

• Defending or critiquing an ethical theory.

Strengths

• Develops presentation skills. By asking students to present a response to course material to their peers, students are pushed to not only question or evaluate the material on their own, but they also must consider how to articulate those questions or evaluations clearly, so that others might follow their thinking. As skills, preparing responses for presentation not only trains presentational skills, it also naturally encourages to think their responses through more carefully than they might otherwise.

• Invests students in section discourse. By tasking a student (or students) with providing lead-in questions or objections to the material, you can create a discussion centered around student contributions. Moreover, the students or students assigned to present are given extra reasons to become especially invested in at least one piece of course material. This helps encourage a section culture of student-student discussions and can give students a real sense of control and ownership over section discussions.

• Great for preparing for papers or other assignments with an evaluative component. Many assignments, especially in courses focused on ethical subject matter, ask students to put forward some kind of evaluation of material presented in the course. Asking students to prepare reading responses throughout the course gives students a head start on such assignments. Consider collecting student responses over the term and making them available to all students, so they can draw on them for ideas when such assignments come up.

Potential Challenges and Solutions

• The student(s) assigned to present has misunderstood a significant part of the assigned reading or reading section. Properly evaluating course material requires having an understanding that material (specifically, the kind of understanding aimed at by identifying and remembering goals, as well as applying and analyzing goals). Any confusion about the material itself can lead to a confused response to the material, which can, in turn, lead discussion astray.

  • Meet with the presenter(s) ahead of time. Before section, schedule a meeting with the students assigned to present. Have a conversation about the material and encourage them to ask any questions they have. This will give everyone a good chance to catch any major confusions before they make it into the class presentation.

  • Provide the presenter(s) with guiding questions. When presentations are assigned, provide the presenters with questions about the relevant materials. Use these questions to direct the students’ attention to key ideas, distinctions, arguments. This can not only help students understand the material but also provide them with a sense of what parts of the material are especially interesting to respond to.

  • Gently intervene. If a misunderstanding does make it through to the in class presentation, and that misunderstanding concerns something significantly relevant to section discussion, you can address the error as a useful opportunity for clarification or elaboration on difficult academic material (rather than presenting the error as a flaw in the presenter’s work). Consider phrases like, “Oh, that’s actually a tricky part to follow, we should clarify what the author says,” “We should pause here to elaborate the author’s view,” and so on.

• Students are especially nervous about presenting. Many students are already uncomfortable participating in group discussions, and the idea of being the center of attention for some portion of a discussion section can feel especially nerve-wracking.

  • Do group presentations. Assign students to present in pairs or small groups. This will not only keep anxious students from having to be alone in the spotlight, but it will also provide students with an opportunity to collaborate ahead of time, encouraging students to make connections and discuss coursework outside of class.

  • Meet with students ahead of time. Pre-presentation meetings can not only help clear up any misunderstandings about the material, but provide you with an opportunity to help students think through and structure their presentation ahead of time. Having a solid, TF-approved plan for presenting can help cut down the anxiety of public academic presenting.

Well-suited for:

• Providing an original defense or critique of an ethical claim or theory.

• Modifying an ethical claim or theory to respond to some problem.

Strengths

• Encourages students to commit to and defend a view. By asking students to put their thoughts in writing, you push students to not only generally think about a question or problem but also to articulate a specific answer with specific reasons behind it. The short time limit also discourages waffling.

• Encourages student-student engagement. Grounding discussion in students responses ensures that students are fundamentally responding to one another, as opposed to you or to course material. This gives them the chance to hear and contend with the often wide variety of ethical views, claims, and concerns of their peers, while also encouraging them to see these peers as valuable sources of insight and feedback.

• Great for writing assignment preparation. The quick write discussion format can be an excellent way to get students to start thinking about and preparing to work on larger writing assignments. You can design your questions/prompts to be in-line with assignment requirements, so that students are pushed to start thinking about the contents of their writing well before any deadline. Moreover, the ensuing discussion provides students with an early source of peer feedback on their early ideas.

Potential Challenges and Solutions

• Students struggle to put down their ideas in the limited time given. Students can find writing under a time limit particularly stressful, and may feel like they cannot produce thoughtful responses in the time given.

  • Share questions or prompts ahead of time. You can give students time to think about their answers (thus easing the stress of time limits) by emailing out questions and prompts ahead of section. You might even just share the questions/prompts at the start of section and move on to something else before you have students begin writing, naturally leaving time in section for students to start thinking about their responses.

  • Emphasize the preliminary nature of their responses. Make clear to students that, while they should provide reasons for their responses, they aren’t expected to have a fully-developed argument right from the start. In fact, part of the purpose of the discussion afterward is to encourage students to clarify, revise, and perhaps even outright switch their thinking based on the feedback of their peers.

• I don’t have time in section to properly facilitate a discussion of every student’s response. Section time is finite, and you may struggle to find time to discuss every student’s unique response. However, simply letting student contributions go unrecognized and unused is not especially conducive to an inclusive discussion.

  • Group similar responses together. Look over the written responses before convening the discussion. Organize the discussion around the question/prompt students respond to, as well as patterns in those responses. So, for example, if you asked a question about the classic trolley dilemma, you might ask one student in favor of diverting the trolley to go first and explain her reasoning, and then invite those who agree to elaborate upon the answer (without repeating it). You can then invite those who disagree to offer their criticisms.

  • Break into smaller groups. If you provide multiple different questions/prompts, you might consider breaking your down by question/prompt responded to and holding multiple mini-discussions in parallel.

  • Keep a record of unaddressed student contributions. Either in class (on the board, in your notes, etc.) or through an online document, maintain a list of responses, questions, and objections that don’t get properly addressed in class discussion. This not only recognizes otherwise ignored student contributions but can also be used as fodder for future sections discussion or even as inspiration students can use for writing and other assignments.