OCW: Do you have tips on how to get the most out of a seminar-format class like this one? How do you elicit/encourage productive discussion?
Justin Reich: Some great advice is at https://instructionalmoves.gse.harvard.edu/facilitating-discussions.
One key point is preparation—selecting engaging activities, readings, and sources for students to work with before class, so you have good things to discuss in class. Then, when students arrive, I try to design introductory activities that get students to productively revisit the material. The best of these activities ask students to extend their preparation in some way, without being too much revisiting the material. Here’s the tightrope:
- It can’t ask students just to revisit the material, because then they won’t do the reading.
- It has to reward students for doing the reading by asking them to do some interesting extension.
- It can’t be so hard that students will be stuck if they haven’t done the reading or haven’t done it well, or so hard that they need help from me to get started.
For instance, when we read the first half of Larry Cuban’s Teachers and Machines, I ask them to come in, get in small groups, and draw a schematic of all of the stakeholders in an edtech adoption decision and all of their interests. If you haven’t done the reading, this exercise is a bummer; you’re either standing around doing nothing or skimming the reading for quick clues. If you have done the reading, you’ll remember some of the stakeholders but realize there are more of them than you recognized. You’ll realize that Cuban talks about their interests and motivations, but not always in an organized and systematic way (because his core argument is organized in some other dimension).
I usually have the students put these drawings up on chalkboards and walls. They work on them for a while, I give some hints and prompts, and then we have a discussion about stakeholders and interests as described in Cuban. We have a shared task, to create the best possible synthesis of these existing maps; and students are prepared for the task. The key insight of the exercise is something like “Whoa, there are a lot of stakeholders and they have really different interests.” That causes problems in schools, some of which Cuban recounts, some of which they can discover in conversation, and some of which I can teach them about.
That’s a detailed example, but the blueprint is the same for many activities: good readings, something that kickstarts their individual or small group engagement with the reading, and then some questions that get them discussing their observations together. This all works better in the first half of the semester. As students get more tired, I talk more!
