Ronald Mawby

Whitney Young College Honors Program, Kentucky State University

Everyone agrees that learning is best when students are personally involved and intellectually active. Today I will talk about an alternative use of class time that promotes student activity. In this alternative students and teacher read books in common outside of class, and then come together in class to discuss them. The class discussion is really a collective inquiry, in which we ask and try to answer questions. The questions may be of comprehension, asking what the book means; or of evaluation, asking whether it is true, or of consequence, asking, given what is said, what follows.

Now I am not opposed to lectures. I just think lectures should be handed out before class, so students can study them at their own pace. In the Honors Program in which I teach the books we read serve as the lecture. If I have things to add, I write up notes on the readings and distribute them before class. Then class time is spent answering student questions, and trying to advance our understanding.

This method can be used in almost any subject matter. We use it in literature, philosophy, natural and social sciences, including lab sciences, and mathematics. I have been in such class sessions, as a student or a teacher, over 4,000 times. I suppose that I have seen, and made, most of the mistakes that can be made in leading discussion classes. Based on my experience, I offer you some rules of thumb. I state them, for brevity, rather dogmatically.

First a word on logistics. I assume an upper limit on class size of about 20 to 25 students. I'm not saying it couldn't be done with larger classes, but I haven't done it, and haven't thought about how I would.

If you want students to learn through discussion, the most important thing is what you give them to talk about. The texts or materials should be both intelligible and challenging. Our rule for inclusion of a book into a course is that if a book is not worth re-reading, it is not worth reading. Or at least, it is not worth discussing. Ours is a "great books" program; we read excellent books. In some classes though we also use a contemporary textbook to present history. The students quickly learn the difference between the textbook and the real books. They say the textbook is boring, there is nothing to talk about, and they are right. So the ground zero rule for discussion classes is give them something to talk about.

Of course if they don't read what you assign the discussion will, let us say, falter. To ensure that students do the reading, sometimes at the start of a session I give short reading quizzes that are easy for students who have read the text, and impossible for those who haven't. This encourages the preparation that makes discussion profitable.

So then. Your students have read something worthwhile. You meet for discussion. How do you get the students to talk?

Everything should convey that the class will proceed by discussion. Physically you should seat students around a table, or put the chairs in a circle; they need to see each other. Since most people find it easier to speak to people they know than a roomful of strangers, early on introduce students to each other.

You must state clearly the expectation that they will speak. From kindergarten on kids in school are taught to sit still and be quiet. Since some students will take encouragement to speak as license to fool around, you must make clear that the purpose of the discussion is to learn from each other, and that requires careful listening and common courtesy. Students need time to learn how to have a coherent discussion; you must accept that, and sometimes talk directly about how discussions can be improved.

Also you need to explain the rationale for the method. Many students have a radically mistaken notion of what collegiate learning requires. They think going to class is like going to the dentist–unpleasant but occasionally necessary–the main difference being that at the dentist you keep your mouth open and in class you keep your mouth shut. They think that while the students keep still the professor performs an operation, and, if he does it right, the students can then spit out information. To counteract this notion you need to explain, repeatedly, that collegiate learning is active intentional learning, it requires thoughtful study, that the instructor can help, but the actual learning is something that the student performs. If you don't convey this, students will think you are abandoning your responsibility and asking them to do your job.

So much for what to do. More important is what not to do. The first rule is don't just say something–sit there. Your silence creates a space for your students to talk. If you persist in talking, your students never will.

Educators have measured classroom "wait time", the time the teacher waits for a response to a question before saying something else. The average wait time is less than a second. When teachers change only one thing – extending their wait time – the classroom dynamic tends to change. If students are given time, they can think rather than just recall. Students will come to believe that they can influence the course of the discussion, that what they say is important, rather than just something that fills in the blanks of a scripted lecture. The classroom is not like radio where dead air is a disaster. If you want students to talk, shut yourself up. This is easy to say, but hard to do. Everything pulls you to talk. The student's learned passivity, their curiosity about your insights, your own enthusiasm, your fatigue, your desire for control–the list goes on. You can say you want student discussion, but you need to back it up with action, or, in this case, non-action. Sometimes, after asking for questions or comments at the start of class, and waiting through minutes of silence, I have disbanding the session, saying that if there are no questions, we will go on to the next assignment. Students soon realize I am serious. If you are not serious, your students will find out, and you won't have to worry about responding to student statements, since there won't be any.

Suppose you let the students talk, and a student has taken a risk, spoken aloud, revealed his thought. How should you respond? The key is to find something of value in what the student says. When the student throws his hat into the ring, you must pull a rabbit out of it. We assume student remarks are directed at a truth, and though they may not adequately express that truth, the goal at which they aim should be acknowledged. I was told of a teacher who was a master at this. He could find in the most trivial or cloudy student attempt something of merit. Once he asked a question and a student gave an answer that was wrong. Not just vague or incomplete or unqualified or potentially misleading, but wrong, plain flat completely wrong. The teacher thought about it for a minute then said "Well, yessss ... in the sense of no." Courage must be rewarded with recognition.

To find value in student comments think developmentally: at first praise anything, then gradually raise the standard. Praise a defective remark as an interesting speculation, or as implicitly pressing a crucial question, or as offering a partial insight, or as bringing up a common misconception that must be dispelled, or as the right answer to a different question.

Students will sometimes defend their silence by pleading ignorance. But ignorance is no excuse. Discussions profit most from genuine questions. And questions don't depend on full knowledge. A question just is articulated ignorance. So insist that students ask their real questions. Sometimes we require every student to write out, perhaps on index cards, two or three questions to be submitted at the start of every class. The teacher looks them over, groups them, and they become the day's agenda. Students may hesitate to ask their questions because questions reveal ignorance, which is bad, and they are afraid their questions are stupid. Assure them that the only stupid question is the one you have but do not ask, and that questions reveal a desire to know, which is good. Celebrating questioning teaches students to identify with their intellectual curiosity.

Occasionally you may have a student who talks too much or too pointlessly. It’s best to deal with this graciously outside class; don't embarrass the student. Embarrass one and you may silence all.

We want students to speak so their minds are open to inspection. We don’t always find that what is said passes inspection. Part of the task of the teacher is to refute falsehood, for if there are no better or worse ideas, what is the point of education?

When correcting errors try to begin by noting something good, so the student will find it easier to hear you. Then the rule is to use no authority but reason. Your ideal should be to refute errors by pointing out what the student could have noticed for himself that would convince him of his error. This lessens the mystery of incomprehensible epistemic authority, in which the teacher just knows and the student just doesn't. You foster independence by showing how to treat ideas as hypotheses that can be evaluated, rather than personal property to be defended. By giving reasons you show students how to reason. By making bare assertions you fortify their folly of supposing that learning is based on authority rather than authority on learning.

I have been talking as if the teacher should respond to every student remark, and hence be involved in every turn of talk. This is not at all ideal. A teacher who participates in every exchange acts as the center of a set of radii, the hub of a wheel. But the goal of a teacher is to disappear, leaving his function behind at work in the students. For this to happen the discussion must be carried by the students. The ideal is a conversation in which the teacher is a participant, but the students largely direct themselves.

We can help this happen by shaping things so that students talk to each other. Since students usually talk to the teacher, sometimes I avoid eye contact with whomever is talking so the speaker will look at another student, and draw that student into the conversation. Note that this can be risky, for students may think you don’t care about what they are saying. Sometimes I ask other students to give the speaker feedback, so that they are talking to each other instead of always to me. I will ask questions that assume they should be talking to each other, such as "how does what you just said relate to what Jane said?" By the way, students also can and should enforce conversational coherence. In fact one way to get shy students to talk is to have them comment on other student statements. It's fairly low risk to say "I agree with you" or "I didn't understand–could you say that again?"

Students may question the value of talking with other students; after all, they think, what do students know? I like to quote physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who when asked what they did at the Institute for Advanced Study, said, "we explain to each other the things we don't understand." Students need to realize that a larger understanding can emerge from the partial and incomplete understandings of discussion participants–that they can figure things out themselves and don't need always to rely on the teacher.

If the teacher ought to disappear, leaving his function behind, what is that function? The teacher should be the best student in the class: the best prepared, the most eager to understand, and the least satisfied with vague, careless, or otherwise inadequate statements. Whitehead said the teacher should show himself as an ignorant man thinking. The main teacherly function is to be aware of ignorance.

Students are often ignorant about their ignorance–they think they know what they do not know, and they think they do not know what they do know. Socrates spent his teaching life uncovering ignorance by asking questions. One role of the teacher is to raise questions that touch the mind's growing edges. The mind grows from the middle out. We start with the rough and vague generalities of common sense and then grow more precise distinctions and more encompassing generalizations. Good questions therefore push for finer distinctions or wider unifications, or else put in question what students take for granted.

The sixth rule is named from T. S. Eliot’s remark: "In matters of great importance the critic must not coerce, and he must not make judgments of worse and better. He must simply elucidate: the reader will form the correct judgment for himself" (1920, 11).

In some subjects the teacher’s ultimate value judgments do not arise. But in ethics, politics, economics, religion, in questions of personal or group identity, value issues naturally arise, and the teacher must decide whether to advocate for one position. Opinions differ about the proprieties, and I mention this rule mainly to direct attention to the issue. My own principle is to advocate the importance of the subject matter and the process of inquiry, though I also tend to bring out that side of disputed questions that I think my students tend most to overlook. In practice this means I advocate intelligence and reason in matters of value, and argue against any opinion that makes inquiry pointless.

One last word. When teaching by discussion you forgo the pleasure of shaping and giving a beautiful lecture uninterrupted by annoying questions. Rather than seeing how little your students know only at exam time, and so suffering a brief despair relieved by the prospect of semester's end, you meet them every day where they are, in their messy confusion. Some days you’ll be horrified to think that your students are eligible to vote; other days they will make you proud of the human race. I recommend that you concentrate on the good days, and recognize that you are not teaching just subject matter but attitudes of respect for your students and dignity for the life of the mind, and such things, though hard to test on a final exam, might in the end be the most important of all.

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