Introducing Material
Student-Directed Questioning: Before section, ask students to prepare questions on key concepts, claims, or theories from lecture or readings. You may identify specific topics or subjects to narrow students’ focus or let them draw on anything from course materials. In section, ask students to raise their prepared questions, and invite students to provide (partial or complete) answers, or ask for specific clarifications. Invite other students to elaborate or ask questions of other students’ answers.
Well-suited for:
Remembering specific ethical concepts, questions, claims and theories (from class or readings).
Learning context around ethical claims and theories.
Learning a range of ethical views on a given issue.
Strengths:
Tailors discussion around students’ needs and interests. By allowing students to raise the questions around which section discussion is centered, you can help ensure the class discussion addresses materials and topics that students are most concerned with (whether that is because they find it especially interesting or because the find it especially challenging).
Provides a built-in opportunity for feedback: By having students prepare questions, you can get a sense of some of the issues surrounding class materials that students are struggling with, as well as the issues they find most interesting.
Great for introducing or reviewing new material from lectures or readings. Often times, the critical first step to understanding new material is articulating points of confusion or concern. Student-directed questioning pushes students to start articulating those points, which in turn allows you to build a discussion around those points, clarifying and developing them as a class.
Potential Challenges and Solutions:
My students’ questions aren’t addressing points I (or my course head) think are important. It is possible that the concerns that are at the forefront of students’ minds, or the concerns that students feel comfortable sharing, miss materials or topics you (or your course head) believe needs to be discussed.
Combine Student-Led Questioning with other strategies. Remember that you don’t need to stick to only one kind of strategy. Consider, for example, combining student-directed and teacher-directed questions. This way you (as the teacher) can raise any questions you feel student’s miss.
Use relevant student questions as a springboard. If a student’s question relates to a key issue, but fails to directly address it, take time in discussion to make that connection or ask the relevant student about it. This not only lets you address the relevant important material, but it lets you recognize a student’s contribution to the discussion and models the collaborative nature of successful academic discourse.
I don’t have time in section to properly facilitate a discussion of every student’s question. Section time is finite, and you may not be able to get to every student’s question. However, simply letting student contributions go unrecognized and unused is not especially conducive to an inclusive discussion.
Group similar questions together. Ask students to submit questions to you before section. Organize questions with similar content together. Then, in section, ask students with similar questions to present their questions together.
Keep a record of unaddressed student questions. Either in class (on the board, in your notes, etc.) or through an online document, maintain a list of questions that don’t get properly addressed in class discussion. This can 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.
Lecture Walkthrough: Using detailed notes (or a recording, if available), discuss key moments from a recent lecture with students. Highlight important concepts, questions, and theories raised in the lecture. Then, bring students in by asking them follow-up questions about the highlighted portions, or asking them to ask their own follow-up questions. Use these questions as the basis for further discussion.
Well-suited for:
Remembering specific ethical concepts, questions, claims and theories (from class or readings).
Learning context around ethical claims and theories.
Learning a range of ethical views on a given issue.
Strengths:
Focuses discussion around specific topics from lecture. The Lecture Walkthrough format provides built-in structure to keep section discussion relatively focused on specific ideas and issues raised recently in class.
Makes explicit the sometimes implicit content and structure of a lecture. Effectively learning and processing information through the lecture format is a learned skill, one which students will struggle with to varying extents. Talking through the ways a particular lecture is structured and emphasizing what information is being prioritized by the lecture, as well as how that priority is communicated by the lecturer and the structure of her lecture, can help students in the process of acquiring this skill.
Great for discussing new information. A lecture walkthrough provides extra time and support for students to process the flood of information they can receive in a single lecture. This can be especially useful after lectures that have introduced a new topic or section of the class, when students are likely grappling with a set of new ideas all at once.
Potential Challenges and Solutions:
I am doing all/most of the talking. It can occasionally be difficult to keep the Lecture Walkthrough format from feeling like a second lecture commenting on the first. This can prevent students from being actively and directly involved in the learning process, nullifying one of the key virtues of discussion sections.
Be a guide, not a translator. Rather than directly explaining what is being said in a highlighted lecture moment, ask students to explain what is being said (to you and other students). This will not only help the Lecture Walkthrough format be more of a discussion as opposed to a second lecture, but it will also encourage students to rely on each other (rather than only you) as sources of learning.
Invite students to select their own moments to focus on. Encourage (or even require) students to identify moments in lecture that they had questions about or felt were important. This can be done ahead of section or during the walkthrough itself. Let students jump in when their selected moment comes up, and ask them to explain why they’ve selected that moment of the lecture: what question do they have about it or why do they think it’s important? Use this as the grounds for further discussion.
Students are responding only/mostly to me, and not to one another. As you are guiding students through the lecture,this format can naturally put you at the center of any discussions that emerge from consideration of the lecture. This strategy can lead to many student-teacher-student or teacher-student-teacher interactions while constraining the number of student-student interactions.
Combine Lecture Walkthrough with other strategies. Make the Lecture Walkthrough only part of the agenda in a given section. For example, you might dedicate only the first part of section to the walkthrough and then follow up by breaking into small group discussions. Different activities can shake up classroom social structure, functionally removing you from the immediate section interaction, and thus force students to rely on their peers more.
Explicitly incorporate students’ responses into your own responses. When students turn to you for information and feedback, explicitly rely on questions and answers put forth by other students: collect questions/answers on the board or in an online document, use students’ questions, answers, and particular phrasing to frame discussion topics, call out and connect related points made by distinct students, and so on. Even if you are, functionally speaking, at the center of the discussion, you can still make the discussion clearly student-driven. Also, whenever possible, try to give students explicit credit for their contributions.