Why have classroom discussions anyway?

A couple of people observed that, in this post about making classroom discussions actual discussions, I didn’t give any reasons why students actually should discuss. And, I have to say, that when I first started teaching I didn’t understand why, either. Here’s why.

I was a voracious reader and an intent listener. I used to (from age 4 at the latest) demand that my parents let me go to bed early so that I could listen to the radio (not music – but Radio 4: documentaries, comedies plays and, when I was 9, a 13 x 1 hour radio dramatization of Nicholas Nickleby, on Sunday evenings. By the time I was in college, listening to someone talk about philosophy for an hour was almost effortless – I did the reading, listened carefully, and took extensive notes. I also wrote a weekly essay… So who needed classroom discussion?

And when I started teaching, in the US, as a TA, leading discussion sections, I guess I assumed my students were much the same. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I lived a lot in my own head, and was not especially perceptive about people or the way they learned (despite having been to a good number of different schools, each with quite different demographic profiles; I even managed to attend two different colleges in my 3 years, the first one having closed down while I was there!). The first class I TA-ed had an excellent professor, who was friendly, engaging, and clear. And in section I supplemented her lectures, which more, mini-lectures, focused on details and, to be fair, allowing students to talk more than they could in lecture. The best students did the reading, and were on top of what was going on; and many of the rest remained confused, often because they hadn’t done the reading, but sometimes even when they had. This was clear in their writing, which I graded, and was often quite confused even though they had been in class and section.

How could this be? I have a much better sense of the answer 30 years later (as one might hope).

The students were – and still are – not like me. Hardly any of them are like me. Not that they are less smart, but they have different ways of learning than mine (most of them having not been treated to a diet of BBC Radio 4 for most of their waking hours during childhood, and not having been surrounded by books and the expectation of reading them, and many of them having had other, more appealing, things to do). I now believe that most people can’t listen, usefully, to even a more expert speaker than I am, for 75 minutes straight, and pick up all the nuance, even if they have done the reading which, frequently, they haven’t, there being no penalty to not doing it, or reward for doing it, in lecture-based classes. [1]

But the students were – and my current students are – like me in one way – a way that I didn’t really understand that I was like them. They need to talk in order to learn. They need to hear the words coming out of their mouths, practice making arguments, giving reasons, and hearing reasons from others to whom they do not feel an immediate inclination to defer (i.e. not just me). And, of course, in fact, I did all these things, and learned a lot from them, just not really in class. Two reasons. One is that I had weekly tutorials with one of the faculty (this was the system for Philosophy in the two London colleges I attended); but the other, much more significant, was that after just about every lecture I retired to the student refectory with friends and discussed the lecture and/or the readings and/or the essays we were writing. This, I am sure, is where I learned the most.

My students don’t have tutorials. And most are not habituated to discussing their classwork outside of class. I don’t judge them for this. Most of them have been taught, since middle school, on a kind of factory model – you go to class, you learn things, you regurgitate them on tests (or, very occasionally, in papers) and then you either (if you are poor or working class) go to your job, or (if you are middle or upper middle class) devote yourself to being a semi-professional athlete, or musician, or actor, or debater, or whatever.[2] Learning from (as opposed to getting good grades in) classes (as opposed to from ‘activities’) is devalued both by their families and by the schools that they attended and therefore by them. But even the students acculturated to, or hungry for, intellectual excitement relating to their classes have their time structured in a way that makes it difficult to talk with their classmates. They are taking different classes, have conflicting schedules, and find their community in their dorms or their clubs, rather than in their classes.

So they need to discuss intellectual issues in class, both to do the learning of the discipline-specific content and skills that can only occur through discussion – through practical application if you like – and to get habituated to doing the same outside of class. They need, I think, to be told explicitly why classroom discussion is such an important part of the class, and that they should discuss the material with friends or classmates outside of class – not just when they have a test, but all the time, instead of discussing the much less interesting things that make up small talk. (And, just as a general matter, I have become much more explicit over time about everything I want them to do. Eszter mentions the value of them learning each other’s names, and the value of name tents, but acknowledges that she doesn’t tell them to learn one another’s names – I do, now, and I explain why (because I want them to talk to one another, not just to me)).

After my previous post went online it almost immediately prompted a hallway discussion, during which I revealed that in some of my small classes I say really very little: my ambition is that, on average, I should be speaking for no more than 25% of class time. My colleague looked horrified: “But don’t we want them to learn how to think in a certain way?”. Yes, we do. But how to we get them to think in that way? I am just skeptical that, for most of them, simply being in a room with us, the experts, thinking outloud in that certain way (usually without much expertise, and with no training, as speakers) is optimal for getting them to think in that way. [3] First of all, the more we talk, the less pressure they are under to read carefully beforehand – and the texts we make them read reveal the certain way of thinking much better than our (amateur) lecturing does. Second, as I said, when we talk for long periods I just don’t think they can focus enough (and I don’t think that is a defect in them at all). Third, as I also said, the most effective way to make them think in the certain way that we want them to be able to, is to induce them to talk in that way.

There’s another reason for wanting discussion, which Jen Morton captures in this op-ed. Students vary a lot in how confident they are (and my experience is the same as Morton’s: the level of confidence they have in challenging discussion correlates well with class background). My observation is that confidence, while it correlates with social class, does not correlate tremendously well with competence, and, as I pointed out here some people systematically undervalue their own contributions. So we have a duty to elicit, by whatever means necessary, participation and discussion from all students, regardless of their predisposition to participate: they all need to learn through discussing, and they all need to learn through hearing others participate. As Morton says:

A college education bestows not just cognitive skills—mathematical, historical, and scientific knowledge—but practical skills—social, emotional, and behavioral competencies. Tenacious, confident, and socially competent employees have an edge over equally cognitively talented employees who lack those practical skills.….

One might argue that these skills are most appropriately learned at home, not in college. But here is where inequality rears its ugly head. Children of middle-class families learn how to navigate middle-class social relationships at home. Children from impoverished communities often do not. This is not to say that children from impoverished communities lack practical skills, but rather that the social, emotional, and behavioral competencies they acquire are ones that are appropriate to their communities. The differences in these social skills can be quite subtle, such as variations in when and how to make eye contact, or how deferential to be when speaking to authority figures. But their impact can be significant. And because children growing up in poverty in the United States are more likely to grow up around and go to school with other poor children, they have fewer opportunities to interact with the middle class and “pick up” the social skills valued by the middle class—and middle-class employers.

The entire post has been about Philosophy teaching. But I imagine that what I say about the necessity of talking applies to other humanities and social science subjects. Teaching humanities thinking without getting them to talk seems to me like teaching students mathematical thinking without getting them to do problem sets. But even in other subjects, discussion seems to play a vital role. I was struck by an offhand facebook comment my eminent colleague in the Math Department here, Jordan Ellenberg, made the other day about this: something to the effect of: “Make them give their own answers to a problem, then make them discuss with their neighbor, and witness the miracle of convergence on the correct answer”.

I’ve also been talking about small classes of 20 or so. Things are different in the large lecture: personally, I suspect that in my typical large lecture I still spend quite a bit more than 50% of the class time talking, though I do have regular discussion tasks and exercises within a session, and some that last entire class sessions. All of the large lectures in my department are accompanied by discussion sections and, for me, the clue of what a discussion section for is in the name. But, running good discussions requires skill and experience, so one thing we need to think about when we think about improving instruction is how to equip TAs with those skills which, surprisingly often, they have not had the opportunity to observe in practice during their own undergraduate experience and which, typically, they have not practiced before becoming a TA.

As usual: comments, criticisms, refinements, examples, illustrations, welcome!

[1] in fact I still can (though its a not a skill I am proud of). I can even listen to people reading dense text for 75 minutes, which is still done in professional meetings of Philosophers (though I doubt many classes). Although I can do this latter thing, I rarely do it – I think about other things instead, in silent rebellion against a bizarre practice.

[2] Exaggeration being deployed here, but not much.

[3] I gave a 20 minute mini-lecture within my (22 person) freshman class yesterday – and was, frankly, a bit alarmed by the total and complete focus of 22 students, hanging on my every word. But what are they thinking?? (Teaching Midwesterners is particularly treacherous because they are trained to look interested and attentive even when they are bored out of their minds).