Category Archives: Lectures & discussion

Discussion Stagnation

[Note after writing this: I see that I was asking this question a number of months ago in my blog…guess it’s an unresolved issue and has been for awhile…]
Seminar discussions in my Arts One class this past year were not as lively as they have been in past years. This class meets in a group of about 20 twice a week for 75 minutes, after a 2 hour weekly lecture. This is quite a bit of time for first year students to be responsible for discussion each week. My strategies in the past have been to spend part of the time outlining main points in the readings, then pose some questions that should generate discussion; start with some writing assignment that will generate thought and discussion; ask for student questions for discussion; start with student presentations where they prepare questions before the class. These have all worked okay except “ask for student questions for discussion.”

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Whose discussion question is this, anyway?

One of the courses I teach on a regular basis has a significant discussion component–after a two hour lecture each week, I and a group of about 20 students meet twice a week for 1.5 hours each to discuss the texts and lecture. I have found that I tend to develop a pattern of encouraging discussion on the questions I’m interested in, and somehow am not doing enough to generate discussion on students’ own questions and ideas. I am not doing this on purpose, but this pattern has inevitably developed each time I’ve taught this course (this is my third year doing so).

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What is class time for? Part II

After a long hiatus for the summer, I am finally getting back to posting on this blog–I was working on research as well as moving to a new apartment, and so my thoughts on teaching were not as prolific as usual during the past six weeks or so.

I am posting one idea I put in place in one of my courses for how to make class time more than lecture with some discussion within the big class group thrown in. I had considered student presentations, but given that my Social and Political Philosophy class has 60 students this term, and given that the term is only 13 weeks long, it’s hard to fit in 60 presentations. Another option that I’ve used in the past is group presentations, where groups of two-three students work together to present something to the rest of the class. In the past I’ve been able to do that because I’ve had break-out discussion sections in addition to the lecture, and the presentations could happen in separate discussion groups. That worked well because then several presentations could happen at the same time. But it requires the discussion-group setup, which my course this term doesn’t have.

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What is class time for? Part I

Barbara Ganley posts a few ideas in response to a question she says she gets regularly: if your students are spending time discussing outside of class (through blogs, discussion boards, or otherwise), then what goes on during class time when discussion would otherwise take place? I am interested in the question of “what is class time for,” not because I have or am planning to take discussion out of the class meeting and put it into blogs or discussion boards instead, but simply as a general question: what is the best use of class time for the sake of promoting learning (especially in philosophy courses)?

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