A (way) better way to do discussion

Teachers sometimes ask me for a tool they can use to accomplish an objective in the classroom.

Often, this becomes a simple substitution.

The thinking goes like this:

I want to do a discussion with my kids.

What tool can I use improve my discussion?

There are tools for that.  Classroom has a Question feature, and, depending on what you're trying to do, Slack, sli.do, or Padlet can do the job.

But really, it's the decisions that you make after the tool decision that make a difference in instruction.

I was recently working with a teacher to revise a lesson that involved discussion. The teacher wanted to increase student engagement and be as efficient as possible to meet his objectives.

He chose the Question feature in Classroom to facilitate the discussion.  By using Classroom, the students could now interact with their groups while the teacher was able to evaluate everyone on the same day, instead of listening to several speeches that were all basically the same.

Plus one for efficiency.

But the assignment also raised the level of student engagement in addition to being more efficient.

Students presented thesis statements, chose the best one to start and then got right to the hard work of looking at how the evidence in the article supported that thesis statement.  The teacher considered this the most important objective and the revised discussion allowed students to spend more time working on it than the previous version.

The revised discussion also added a reflective writing component.  Students discussed evidence and how the author used it, and then they wrote about the process in response to a Question in Classroom.  This process gave them another chance at formulating their thoughts and also allowed them to synthesize their own thoughts with the findings of their group.

Finally, the grading rubric for the activity also changed.  Because the activity had a more clear focus, the rubric could more specifically address some of the objectives in descriptive language. The rubric now details expectations in language guided by Marzano. It also incorporates a version of Marzano's grading scales to evaluate student work.

The teacher, by being open to trying a discussion with new tools, and by experimenting with instructional designs, was able to create a new framework for discussion and assessment that increased both student engagement and instructional clarity in a shorter time frame.