Getting students to speak

Small group work on set questions. Then students come back to a roundtable discussion. Pool their best answers. Invite debate on them. This often (but not always) works. My experience is that year on year, 18 year old students know increasingly less about debating and are less and less inclined to take part in a debate. But then they now have their student debt to think about, and the Holy Grail of a 2:1 that may allow them to pay it back. If tutorials don’t count towards this, why should they bother?

Have students prepare written answers to one of the discussion questions you will take up in the seminar. Shy students are more confident about jumping into the discussion for the issue/question they have specifically prepared for. This is also a big help with students that have another language than that which the seminars are given in as their first language.

WAIT! Get comfortable with long silent pauses. Be quite and wait for the students to talk. The is a battle of the wills the teacher is well placed to win.

WAIT! Allow students to keep talking and debating amongst themselves even if it appears that they are not getting to the heart of the issue. I usually stop myself from interrupting on at least the first two occasions I get the impulse to do so. Often I am pleasantly surprised that when students do eventually get to an important discussion. They seem to learn much more if they get to the heart of the issue and then I can simply explain to them why what they are talking about is important.

Sex ratio seems to make a difference. When the class is dominated by women they also dominate the discussion and visa versa. In both cases it is sometimes necessary to help the minority sex into the discussion.

Size matters, around 10 is a good seminar size.

Be funny and energetic, or at least try. I usually find that students are kind of like an audience at a wedding listening to a toast. They really want you to succeed at being entertaining, so you just need to avoid making a complete ass of yourself in the process. Given the usual lack of alcohol during seminars this should be easier than at a wedding.

I was taking a first year course on Kant many years ago and the seminar was virtually silent. Almost the same group of people were very talkative in the Philosophy of Religion seminar. One reason was that Kant is really hard and most people didn’t understand it or really engage with the required reading. Another was that the Kant seminar was quite early and philosophy students are not at their best in the morning. A third was that the lecturer was a bit intellectually intimidating.

The lecturer decided to force us to do the reading by telling us we each had to come with a list of questions about things we were unclear about or didn’t understand. It didn’t work because few people did it, instead just hoping the others would bail them out.

I’ve been teaching for several years now and my seminars are almost all quite bubbly these days. My tips are:

1) Get the students to feel comfortable around each other. They are nervous but will feel much better if they know each other a bit. Take them for coffee and talk about normal stuff.

2) Many students have never spoken in front of a group. They were quiet at school and it just takes practice for them to get used to it. Find a way to get them to talk about easy stuff first without judgement. Make them take a position and then defend it (easy with ethics).

3) Put them in smaller groups and leave the room for a bit. You might be the problem. I was always very talkative in tutorials with three or four but much less confident in larger groups.

4) Strange as it may seem, many students just don’t get the point of the seminar. Make it clear that it’s for them to clarify their understanding and they have to be proactive. If no-one is saying anything, bite the bullet and go back to the start. Ask what they don’t understand and if it’s everything start again. You’ll soon find something they disagree with. The discussion won’t be very edifying for you but they will learn something.

In my view all students should go on training before they start courses to build confidence and get used to speaking in front of other people. I can always dream.

Start out with easily answered questions. Ask them about their family or their experiences just to get them talking and then switch to more abstract questions.

sat in as non-registered student in grad seminar offered by a distinguished scholar/poet. Each student had to prepare a paper to read, one student per week. At end of presentation, first time out, teacher asked if any comments or questions. No response. Asked 3 times. No response. teacher closed his brief case and said: well if no one has anything to say there is no sense in our staying here. See you next week. Following week, lots of questions and comments.

I am teaching a section on International Human Rights–First Year Seminar–with 18 students. The first few weeks of the class I had difficulty getting students to open up, largely because they were shy and also they were gauging their friends, now they have started opening up a bit. But, I importantly I make two students present every week on the readings and also make them write a 4-5 page readings summary and reactions, which seems to work. I also notice that discussions vary as a function of the degree of difficulty of the subject matter.

I was fortunate (!) to enjoy several of Chris’s political philosophy seminars as an undergraduate at Bristol a few years ago.

Certainly among my cohort the single biggest obstacle (IMO) to participation was simply lack of preparation by the students.

The pre-reading was skimmed at best, and most wouldn’t read beyond the set passage for that session.

The long silences tended to be people sitting there saying to themselves “Sh*t, I hope I don’t get asked… I haven’t the first clue what this is about”.

Not sure what the answer is – perhaps providing a list of specific questions on each text to aid reading? I think many students in Philosophy Depts – particularly those who choose it as a subsidiary module – have vastly different ideas regarding the nature of “philosophical / political” study.

One other thing to consider is the nature of the course – by Week 3-4 most students will (with luck) have chosen the topic for the essay for a given module. If the seminars in Weeks 6-7 don’t relate to the essay, there is (arguably) little point in spending time preparing for a seminar, when one could be hitting the books for the essay.

Of course, it could have been that we were just scared of Prof Bertram ;-)

Here are all my tricks–

1–have a short writing assignment based on the reading

2. make them formulate discussion questions at the beginning of class

3. make them freewrite for 10 minutes on a significant passage at the beginning of class, then discuss responses

4. Circle within the circle. Divide the class into two groups. One must sit in the middle and discuss the reading; the other surrounds it and evaluates the discussion. Then the groups switch. This works particularly well if you split the group into talkers and non-talkers. You, of course, say nothing. The entire burden of the discussion is on them.

5. Talking ball. You have a tennis ball. You throw it into the group. Only the person who has the ball can talk and they get to choose who they throw it to next. You don’t talk at all.

Good luck!

5.

I’ve just finished an MA and I was surprised at how bad most of the students were at presenting and how the professors didn’t seem to care. For the worst ones people would just read through pages of notes word for word, try and discourage this and hopefully the students will become more confident.

When I was a professor (medical imaging), in journal club students were usually silent — except the selected victim — I mean, presenter. I then made a policy that each student had to come with at least one question about the paper every time, and I would go around the room and make them ask it if they hadn’t already spoken up. This worked fairly well, but wasn’t a panacea.

I’ve also had a lot of success with very short (but graded) paper assignments (no more than 500 words). To do them students have to focus their minds on the kinds of questions or observations they might make during class. When these papers are due (students call it “thesis defense day”) discussions come very easily and they maintain a high level of clarity and focus.

Education researchers frequently recommend spreading responsibility. Pair students up or put them in groups to discuss the reading or topic, or to answer a question, or whatever before putting them on the spot in a class discussion. Also, wait: learn to appreciate silence as thinking.

Both are pretty universal recommendations regardless of class type: I currently work in K-12 professional development and recommend these more than anything else for fostering participation in classrooms. At the same time, one of the most interesting (in terms of class time) graduate seminars I ever had took advantage of both collaboration and silence.

I did a couple of things…

The hardest thing, by far, was to let there be silence. I like to fill silence, but my last adviser made it very clear that if I didn’t, eventually someone else would. So the first class or two, I would chatter away if my students wouldn’t, and then I would declare “okay, from now on, you guys talk. I’ll respond to you, but I’m not going to dominate anymore. If you all want to sit in silence for 45 minutes, well… it’s your education money. I hope you’d rather spend it asking questions than just watching the clock tick.” I’ve never had to wait more than a few minutes for someone to break the ice. It helps, though, if students really do believe you when you tell them there are no stupid questions – I tend to illustrate that by talking about some of the stupider things I’ve said/done in classrooms.

Another thing my last adviser suggested was a 3×3 format – prepare three questions, with three followup questions each, based on the readings. This way, I’m at least prepared to talk about a variety of topics and sub-subjects.

Hmm, what else? Students had to write a reading journal-like assignment on each reading, just a few paragraphs, to hand in, as proof they had read it. The justification, other than “I am teacher and therefore God” was that reading is more than reading – it’s reading, writing, and discussion before you can truly understand something. Students were allowed to hand in artwork instead of journals, if that was their preferred medium – and I have lovely artwork on my walls, now, as a side benefit.

The other thing I do pretty obsessively is create playlists on my iPod, and always have music running at low level in the background. I try to make it suggestive to the topic; after a few weeks, someone catches on to what’s going on and it becomes a fun game for them. In classes I know I’ll be doing this, I also make it an assignment that every student send me, at some point over the quarter, a song they feel is related to the class/material – and the last class is their playlist, of which they receive a burned copy.

Everything everyone said about wait time: ditto. Count to ten slowly in your head if you must — if you don’t, you will jump in after a second, because it will have seemed like forever.

Start the discussion by having everyone write something — their answer to a question, five questions on the homework, anything as long as it’s not *too* open-ended (you want them to be able to write it in a minute or two and not be overwhelmed). Best case, this reminds them they have things to talk about. Worst case, you *know* they have something to talk about so you can just call on someone (also should help the shy ones because they don’t have to think on their feet as much).

Don’t let your values dominate — students are very good at figuring out what the teacher wants to hear and not saying anything else. (And, of course, students are uncomfortable if they feel they will be graded down because their politics or other views differ from the teachers’.)

The single best thing I have found, though — if I say something like “raise your hand if you know the answer to X”, I get two hands and it’s the kids who always know everything. If I say, “Who knows the answer to X?” I get at least twice as many hands. How you phrase questions is key. Experiment.

As others have said, ensuring adequate preparation is key. Not telling the students in advance who will be called on to speak first helps a bit.

My preferred method: assign specific reading and some questions, even if only ‘what is it that this author wants to convince you of?’, ‘what is the author’s argument?’. Tell the students to write *short* answers. With luck, that makes them select the important material, and prevents interminable presentations in which the entire reading is summarised.

At the start, select a student by some obviously random method to present what they wrote. The point of the obvious randomness is to make sure that no one can afford not to prepare, even if they were called on first last week. If the student selected has nothing prepared, ask them to leave and mark them as absent. You should warn them that you’ll do this in the first class. Ask another student to respond by noting any differences in what they wrote. Announce to the class that you will say nothing for the first 20 minutes to half-an-hour. Stick to this. Sit to one side, so that they talk to each other, not to you.
After 20 mins or half-an-hour, unless discussion is rattling along just fine, summarise what’s been said, emphasising all the good things that have been said and minimising any criticism, while making sure that any awful errors go corrected. Try to set them off on what you think will be a productive new direction.
This intervention is hard to get right. You can kill the discussion completely. If they clam up at this point, divide them into smaller groups, give them a specific question to answer, and leave for 5-10 minutes while they work on it.

This works much less well in the class with one or two loud and dominant figures. It’s very hard to avoid a more interventionist style in that situation. It works much better with the ‘all silent’ group.

To respond to the actual questions: true randomness in forming groups can mitigate some sex role conflicts; so, too, can the assignation of set roles to group members.

At the beginning of a discussion, ask a fairly broad, big, open-ended question. The best of these questions have the following characteristics: 1) They provide prompts and opportunities for the best students to answer in a sophisticated manner, but aren’t so intimidating that students with less confidence of analytic thinking skills can’t potentially answer them. 2) The potential range of answers to the question might direct class discussion toward a range of issues you were hoping to raise in discussion that day, and 3) The question should be difficult to answer, but not totally impossible to come up with something, for those who have not completed the reading.*

Then, rather than let the question just sit there, tell the students to write an answer, and give them five minutes. Let them use their books, and make sure not to frame it as a quiz, but collecte them at least occasionally and grade them on a credit/no credit basis (but dole out praise for really smart answers sparingly). Then, once the five minutes is up, begin the discussion. No one can credibly claim they’ve got nothing to say, since they’ve got a half-page in front of them that must say something.

Take your group of 6 – 10 learners. Break them into smaller clusters. Give each cluster an index card with their assignment: for example, cluster 1 = “need more info”, cluster 2 = “conclusions”, cluster 3 = “recommendations.” Then present them with a brief problem to solve. The clusters get 2 or 3 minutes to brainstorm. Then they present their ideas. You can moderate the ideas and use them as a springboard for further discussion.

The keys are: 1) everyone gets assigned to a cluster; it’s usually people sitting next to each other. 2) they get their assignment in advance. This lets them focus and pay attention. 3) each group contributes. It’s fun to play with the makeup of the clusters. Boys/girls. Upper/Lower classmen. Whatever. It works beautifully with a strong moderator.

I have done this in a medical residency where no one wants to answer because they’re intimidated. The clusters were 1) more info, 2) diagnosis, and 3) recommendations. Sometimes the clusters were defined as 1) students, 2) interns, 3) junior/senior residents. The latter got the harder part (recommendations). It’s quite fun. Even the quiet participate, because everyone is talking during the initial challenge.

Start with open-ended questions that don’t take long to ask and don’t have necessarily right or wrong answers. The biggest discussion-killer I’ve ever seen was the teacher who asked beautifully-formulated, precise questions at least a paragraph long, and by the time she was done even I, who liked her personally, was enthusiastic about the class, and absorb things pretty quickly, would be sitting there with my mouth hanging open as I tried to recall where the question had started.

In addition to being comfortable with silence, be comfortable with tangents. Give your students a little time where it seems like they’re going off topic, to see if there’s a reason they’re going where they’re going, something you can tie back to the original thing.

If the silence really goes on, consider the possibility that the way you phrased your question made little sense to people not inside your mind. Try to rephrase. Even if it comes out more awkwardly, often it will stimulate something. Though I don’t know, that may be pity.

djw,

OK. Maybe I will give it a try if I ever get the luxury again of long seminars.

Isn’t “Not being as committed about the subject matter as the instructor” more the definition of education than a legitimate reason to excuse students from discussion?

I often start discussions by having one student read a short passage from our text and then asking the class to respond out loud—first by summarizing it, then by interpreting it. The advantage here is in breaking up the reading into manageable portions—a paragraph, perhaps even a sentence—instead of asking the students to address the entire argument or effect at once. I find that once students have their eyes on the page rather than on me or each other, they lose some of their shyness and come up with interesting ideas.

Another thought: don’t wait for students to raise their hands to ask them to speak. Look for other nonverbal cues—a confused expression, a rolling of the eyes, a nod of the head—and say, “Sarah, you look like you agree with Adam’s point,” or, “Robin, you look confused. Are we missing something?” It lets them know you’re paying attention.

A quick suggestion on hand raising, since some have said don’t wait for it and others have pointed out students may be shy/not bother even if they know answers. How about, after one student advances a position, say something like ‘all those who (dis)agree raise your hands’ – and then pick someone whose hand isn’t raised to explain why not…