Helping Students to Not Snub Each Other in Class

As an undergraduate, I took a seminar dedicated entirely to Ulysses by James Joyce. Joyce’s modernist novel is mystifying, so question marks hung on the ends of students’ contributions. As we delivered our tentative remarks, we looked to our professor at the head of the table. She was our life preserver in Joyce’s maelstrom. Directing our comments to her kept our anxieties at bay.

But she would have none of it. Without fail, she’d gently interrupt our halting interpretations and, with a wave of her hand, gesture toward our peers around the table. “This is your audience,” she would remind us. And we’d entertain her request, imitating how seminar dialogues ought to unfold, our eyes darting from one stranger to the next, resisting the urge to lock eyes with the professor. Still, every comment seemed to end with its owner’s neck craned expectantly toward the head of the table.

I now know how that professor must have felt. The undergraduates I teach have wonderful ideas and contribute often during our whole class discussions. But without deliberate intervention on my part, they tend to direct those contributions to me—not each other.

This observation may seem nitpicky. I argue that it’s not. Rather, the student behavior I describe here reflects deeper, problematic norms of the college classroom: that an all-knowing professor occupies the nucleus of the learning environment; that this authority figure’s approval and affirmation is paramount; that one’s peers are not genuine partners in the learning process but virtual strangers riding on the same bus. Those norms complicate efforts to foster authentic, student-centered discussions and require our attention.

Classroom discussions are optimal for many reasons. They can improve students’ communication skills, which are crucial in many professions. They can build students’ capacity for critical thinking and analysis. More fundamentally though, discussions enable individuals to respectfully and authentically engage with others. Discussions teach students how to discuss.

As Walter Parker writes, “[T]he ability and disposition to discuss are themselves legitimate things to learn.” The “disposition to discuss” may well be what students hold onto long after the semester ended. Students may not remember the finer details of a particular text, but they will probably remember the experience of engaging closely with peers around an especially nagging question. At the very least, this demands that students look at and to one another.

How might we shift the focus from the instructor in whole class discussions? Sometimes a hand wave and a reminder about who’s the audience isn’t enough. In fact, interrupting a student who has gotten up the nerve to participate and telling them to stop looking at you may be downright counterproductive. We need more and different interventions. Here are five classroom considerations that can enable students to stop snubbing each other during whole class discussions and start snubbing you instead.

Keep quiet. Embedded for a year in an elementary school classroom in the 1970s, sociologist Hugh Mehan detected a clear pattern in class discussions. He termed this pattern IRE: the teacher initiated discussion with a question, a student responded with an answer, the teacher evaluated that answer. Rinse, repeat. This pattern proves durable and pervasive. Researchers since Mehan have detected it in classrooms at every educational level.

It may make intuitive sense for the person with the most formal training to evaluate each student’s comment after it is issued, but doing so can condition students not to listen to each other and to instead wait to tune in until comments have been filtered back through the “expert.” Weighing in so frequently signals to students that the less refined contribution is only worthy of attention after it has been sufficiently repackaged by the instructor.

If we want students to start looking at and to each other during discussions, we must start by closely scrutinizing such habits. Are we intervening too much? Are we leaving room for students to respond to each other? Sometimes the best response of all is to keep quiet—to restrain our kneejerk reactions, step back, and open the floor for students themselves to weigh in. So, as we set out to shift discussion dynamics, we must first consider whether we are part of the problem.

Add smaller group discussions to the mix. Another reason students may hesitate to direct comments to each other is because we simply haven’t given them enough opportunities to interact outside of the whole class setting. The more occasions we offer students to engage with each other around course material, the more we reduce our own footprint when the whole group reconvenes. Providing students with different dialogic arrangements, such as small group discussions, can build community in the classroom, help students get comfortable engaging with each other and improve the chances that these good habits transfer to the larger conversation.

But we also can’t assume that the behaviors and dispositions we expect in the whole class discussion will organically emerge in small groups. Small group dynamics, too, may require some strategic intervention, and such groups can be ideal for establishing and reinforcing discussion expectations.

Aaliyah El-Amin, a lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education whose practices Meira Levinson and I feature in our book Instructional Moves for Powerful Teaching in Higher Education, actually makes it a requirement that small groups check in with each other before commencing their conversations. Students must first engage with each other as people before tackling course material.

We may have to set even more fundamental expectations, as well. In my own teaching, I have often found that how small groups physically configure themselves plays some role in the overall quality of their discussions. The four students meeting with their desks in a line, as if seated at a bar, are bound to have less equitable and lively discussions than the four who have purposefully rotated their desks to face each other. Now as my students transition to small groups, I circulate to request that they circle up.

Some readers might argue that managing behaviors like those is the office of the elementary and secondary school teacher, not the college instructor. But given the fact that today’s undergraduates are coming to our classrooms having experienced unprecedented disruptions in their schooling, such details may need explicit attention, regardless of how “basic” we consider them.

Get “meta.” When we exercise transparency about why we do what we do in the classroom, students may feel a greater stake in the learning community and invest more of themselves in it. In some cases, actually facilitating a discussion about discussions may be in order. Doing so early on in a course can surface students’ feelings about discussions and their past experiences with them—all helpful information for discussion facilitators. Discussions about discussions also offer neutral spaces to further establish ground rules. Here, we can explicitly set the expectation that students respond to each other.

We can also strategically get “meta” as the everyday discussion unfolds. Pausing a student to remind them that “this is your audience” is one way to do so. A far better way is to wait until a student who is modeling effective discussion norms has finished their contribution and then to explicitly acknowledge what that student did successfully and why we want to see it from everyone.

“Publish” students’ contributions. Speaking of making things public, the more we spotlight students’ original thinking, the better we can dodge the spotlight ourselves. Every week in my courses, students complete a written response engaging with what they have read. It’s a Google doc that I comment on regularly. When I plan for class, I pore over students’ entries, mining them for insights and questions that I want the class to hear. Sometimes I’ll select a sentence or two from every student and compile them on a handout. Then, I’ll have students silently read each other’s writings, marking what resonates with them and what complicates their thinking. In the ensuing discussions, as students respond directly to their classmates’ contributions, it becomes awkward for them to look at me.

Other times, I will project a single student’s contribution for all to see. It may be a lingering question I want us to ponder together or a revelatory analysis that might transport us to new territory. I’ll even parenthetically cite the student’s contribution with a last name and date. Students always find this detail amusing. Though it may initially elicit some smirks, it ultimately sends the message to students that their ideas are worthy of serious scholarly consideration.

Brent Duckor and Carrie Holmberg term this practice “tagging.” They explain it as: “publicly representing variation in student thinking by creating a snapshot or running record of a class’s responses. Most often, tagging is scribing what students say—writing it down—in a place and via a method that allows all in the classroom learning space to see, process, and record it for themselves.” Frontloading tags in a semester can recalibrate default discussion norms in the classroom. Over time, students learn that their voices occupy the core of the learning environment, not the instructor’s—and that discussion behaviors ought to reflect that.

To be clear, I never “publish” personal reflections, which occasionally surface in students’ journals. I never publish misconceptions. I also fix grammatical errors before broadcasting students’ contributions.And when I’m highlighting an individual student’s thinking, I’ll often reach out to them beforehand to ask permission.

Bring a notebook. A final consideration is a simple one: have a notebook and pen handy to jot down students’ thoughts and insights. That helps us move to the periphery while demonstrating our careful attention to the evolving discussion. Although we should regularly look up from our notes to show solidarity with participating students, students are less apt to try locking eyes with us when we’re so focused on accurately representing their views on paper. In these cases, too, it becomes simply awkward to not turn to one’s peers.

And the notebook is not just a prop for deflecting attention. Having one allows us to track participation, chart a discussion’s trajectory and log key contributions we think the class should revisit. As the discussion progresses, being able to reference a student’s quote or phrasing we’ve jotted down is yet another way to publish students’ contributions and showcase our close attention to their sensemaking.

In conclusion, I may be students’ default life preserver during whole class discussions, but I don’t want the job. The discussions that flow from this dynamic are less discussions than they are a succession of teacher-student exchanges that just happen to occur in the presence of other students. What should be a single, focused discussion among 20 individuals becomes 20 separate conversations. It’s hard to even call a discussion like that a discussion.

Taking purposeful steps, we can rewire entrenched discussion norms in the classroom and encourage students to start looking to each other for answers and insights. The pull of the professor may always be a strong one, but I’ve found that deliberate pedagogical moves like those I’ve described here can minimize our presence, redirect engagement patterns and shift the focus back to students.