My personal Reading Notes from McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers as I turn them in for my ENG 770: Teaching of Technical and Professional Writing course with Dr. Rhonda Stanton.

Reading Notes

Chapter 5 – Facilitating Discussion

• Active Learning: “attention to relevant information, organizing it into coherent mental representations, and integrating representations with other knowledge” (38).
• “Discussion techniques seem particularly appropriate when the instructor wants to do the following:
  • Help students learn to think in depth about the subject matter by giving them practice in thinking.
  • Help students learn to evaluate the logic of and evidence for their own and others’ positions.
  • Give students opportunities to formulate applications of principles.
  • Develop motivation for further learning.
  • Help students articulate what they’ve learned
  • Get prompted feedback on student understanding or misunderstanding.
  • Take advantage of the impact that social interaction has on learning and behavior” (39).
  • TO KEEP THEM FROM YAWNING THEMSELVES INTO OBLIVION. If I don’t let them talk to jolt themselves awake, I will lose those kids faster than Apple AirPods in the hands of a toddler.
• Tasks in Teaching by Discussion (39):
  • Help students prepare for discussion
    • I prepped my First Years for discussion by allowing them to get into small groups and run over the questions in the reading before having a full class discussion. Whenever I gave them 5 minutes for that, they were awake and I can only assume validated in their understandings well enough to speak out loud in front of the entire class and myself. Then full class discussion worked a lot better and more was said. That warm up exercise worked out really well.
    • Oh! And would you look at that? That’s exactly what McKeachie says (40). #winning.
    • PPAs – Participation Preparation Assignments: To be handed out at the end of a previous class, these varied assignments aim to prepare students to come to the next class with prepared questions, an easy way to elevator pitch the reading, or “apply the reading content to a scenario appropriate to the topic” (40).
  • Get and maintain participation in discussion
    • Start Discussions with a common experience
    • Starting Discussion with a controversy – #shutitdown #nope This really applies to the class – one class I’ve had was pretty respectful and they could tolerate controversy pretty well, but other classes can get out of hand fast. It feels like it’ll be easy to lose control and that’s not something I’m comfortable losing and getting back. Best to just keep it.
    • Starting Discussion with Questions
      • Factual Questions
      • Application and Interpretation Questions
        1. “How does the idea that ____ apply to ____?” (43)
      • Connective and Casual Effect Questions
        1. “What are the possible causes of this phenomenon?” (43)
      • Comparative Questions
      • Evaluative Questions
      • Critical Questions
    • Starting Discussion with a Problem or Case
      • Breaking a problem into sub-problems (45)
        1. Clarify the Problem
        2. What do we know? What data is relevant?
        3. What are the characteristics of an acceptable solution?
        4. What are possible solutions?
        5. Evaluate those solutions
      • Facilitate the discussion in a way that progress is made.
        • Listening, Responding, and Modeling Discussion Behavior
          • “actively listening to and acknowledging student comments and ideas” (46) – super important as a means of giving them agency as young adults.
          • Reasons why Millennials find Discussions as good experiences:
            1. Value active learning
            2. “Discussion allows them to develop a deeper understanding of what they were learning for themselves, not having to accept the authorities’ versions of everything” (47)
            3. Everyone’s input is valued and considered in drawing conclusions
            4. (not a reason, but) Millennials depend on the instructor to create situations in the classroom that allow these reasons to exist
          • Help students learn and practice the progress of civic discourse.
            • Why Students Don’t Participate:
              • Student habits of passivity
              • Failure to see the value in discussion
              • Fear of criticism or of looking stupid
              • Push towards agreement or solution before alternative points of view have been considered
              • Feeling that the task is to find the answer the instructor wants rather than to explore and evaluate possibilities
            • Listening to the students supportively to make the class a safe place to express ideas.
          • I’ve sort of taken from all of these Tasks in Teaching Discussion –> Get and Maintain Participation in Discussion for my first class discussion as a means to introduce everyone to each other. I play a Last Week Tonight segment called “Scientific Studies” and have the students watch for when John Oliver summarizes, paraphrases, quotes, and cites. That way they have to actively watch the 20 minute long clip, and it’s humorous so they typically get a kick out of it, even if it’s not their cup of tea. Then afterwards I put everyone into fairly large groups and had them compare their results. Knowing everyone would have different results because I gave incredibly vague instructions, I asked them to talk about why they might have more or less tally marks, such as what did they consider a summary, what did they consider a paraphrase, what did they consider a citation and quote, etc. It goes really, really well, and then it’s also a reference point throughout the entire semester I can point back to and everyone knows what we’re talking about.
          • Handling Conflicts and Arguments (51):
            • Reference to the text or other authority may be one method of resolution, if the solution depends on certain facts.
            • Using the conflict as the basis for a library assignment for the class or a delegated group is another solution.
            • If there is an experimentally verified answer, this is a good opportunity to review the method by which the answer could be determined.
            • If the question is one of values, your goal may be to help students become aware of the values involved.
            • Something students will dispute your statements or decisions. Such disagreements may often be resolved by a comparison of the evidence for both points of view, but since teachers are human, they are all too likely to become drawn into an argument in which they finally rest on their own authority. To give yourself time to think, as well as to indicate understanding and acceptance of the students’ point, I suggest listing the objections on the board. Such listing tends to prevent repetition of the same arguments.
            • In any case it should be clear that conflict may be an aid to learning, and the instructor need not frantically seek to smother it.
            • If you’re having problems with a particular student, check the chapter “Dealing with Student Problems and Problem Students.”
          • Student-Led Discussions (55) – I don’t feel great about this, but I suppose I should give it a shot sometime.

Svinicki, Marilla D. and Wilbert J. McKeachie. McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers, 14th Ed, Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2014.