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If you’re a teacher, this has probably happened to you: You have assigned your students a reading. It may be a work of literature, history, science — a chapter in a novel, a magazine article about a new diet, an opinion piece about tattoos. You have selected the text for maximum interest and set the stage for students to dig in. From all you can see, they are eager to start.
Tomorrow is discussion day. Tonight you spend time coming up with a stellar, thought-provoking question to get the ball rolling. So far, so good.
Then things get dicey. It’s time for your question to work its magic and kick-off a rich discussion. With anticipation, you speak.
In response, the usual one or two people indicate they have something to say.
You know the importance of wait-time, so you wait.
And wait.
And wait.
The silence starts to feel deafening. It’s time to act. But, what do you do?
You might decide to let the usual participants carry the ball. This decision gets everyone through the moment, but has a variety of drawbacks. The discussion lacks diversity in perspective. More, students who don’t participate disengage, thinking instead about next Friday’s game, this week’s practice, or what to wear tomorrow. The group gets through the moment, but everyone loses.
You could decide to call on someone who hasn’t volunteered. That decision might result in the desired diversity of perspective, but at what cost? Anxiety. Stress. Embarrassment. Fear. Anger. Tension. Resistance. There has to be a better way.
Maybe the better way is to call on students in a predictable order. Alphabetical. By row. By height. By birthdate. This approach yields diversity without anxiety, but its very predictability can lead to (the aforementioned) disengagement among students who know they won’t be called on.
What about this: Pose your question, but don’t ask for verbal responses. Ask your students to respond in writing. Not writing to turn in. Not writing to edit, revise, and recopy. Writing only to respond, to access their own thoughts.
Assure your students you will not collect their work. You will not review it, correct it, grade it, or even comment on it. The writing is for their eyes only—for exploring their own thinking as it connects to the question.
After five or ten minutes, pose the question again. If your students are like mine, their responses will delight you. The number of students volunteering will skyrocket. Some, who have been quiet up to that point, will speak out. That fact alone makes the strategy worthwhile, but there is more. In my experience, students’ responses will be deeper, broader, more interesting, and more diverse than ever. The discussion will be far-ranging and much more satisfying.
The evening after I tried the idea for the first time, I reflected on these changes. That’s when I realized the power of the approach. First, every student was thinking about the question; no one had “checked out.” Second, because my students had had some time to think and write, once we got to discussing the question, their responses were far richer and more thought thorough than they had been in the past. Third, although I did not collect my students’ writing, they were writing.
There, on the sheets of paper before them, was a brainstorming session, which could be crafted into a well-formed paragraph, essay, or opinion piece. What at first may have seemed like using extra class time “just” to have a discussion, turned out to be a strategy giving twice the value to each minute. No small feat indeed.
