From Theory to Practice: The Discussion Classroom
Editor's Note: The following article was written by James Lang when he was a graduate student. He is currently an associate professor of English in a college in New England..
When I entered my Master's program in English literature, I participated in a one-day training session for new teachers the week before classes commenced. Shortly thereafter I became a college composition teacher. I was twenty-one years old, and my sole qualification for the position of an adjunct lecturer was that I had been judged a sufficiently competent writer to take up a course of graduate study in English literature.
As you may well imagine, the first few courses
I taught represented some pretty rough terrain, for both myself and my
students. Not only did I not know what I was doing, but I didn't even
have the conceptual vocabulary to understand what I might have been
doing wrong--much less what I might have done to improve. As my course
of study progressed, and as I graduated from my M.A. program and
continued into the Ph.D. program at Northwestern, the maturation I
underwent as a scholar--coupled with a closer attentiveness to the way
I was being taught in my graduate courses--led to some improvement in
my teaching. I began to recognize more clearly obstacles to student
learning, and the techniques to overcome those obstacles, although I
still had trouble mastering and implementing those techniques. I had at
least reached the point at which I knew what my problems were, and I
understood--if only abstractly--what was necessary to solve them.
I knew primarily that I wanted to conduct my
classes through discussions. Whether I was teaching a composition
course or a literature course, what I wanted most to see in my
classrooms--what I enjoyed more than anything in my professional
life--was an animated intellectual conversation about writing and
literature.
I knew that students learned best when they participated actively in the learning process, and I felt it was possible to direct classroom conversations in such a way that my students learned from them the basics of critical reading, thinking, and writing. Unfortunately, what I experienced most frequently was a classroom situation either in which student silence compelled me to do most of the talking, or in which a few excessively vocal speakers dominated the discussion. My reaction to this situation was to continually redesign the course as I went along: if the students are not participating, I reasoned, it must be because I have not designed an interesting and engaging enough course.
It was not until I came to the Searle Center and began to do some reading in the teaching literature that I emerged from this impasse and finally managed both to conceptualize and actually to resolve some of my difficulties in the discussion classroom. One of the first ideas I encountered in the teaching literature was the notion of a course as a piece of intellectual work comparable to a piece of scholarship. A course should be a well-planned, moderated, and dynamic intellectual construction upon which teacher and students collaborate during the quarter. When I first encountered this idea, I realized that I had intuitively been searching, in my own course creations, for just this kind of intellectual construction. It took me only a brief few days of reflection to realize why I had never quite managed to effect the construction I envisioned--why, in other words, there always seemed to be some slippage between my theoretical constructions and the actual shape my courses took in practice.
That slippage lay in the expectation I had that my students would share the excitement and enthusiasm I felt over a carefully sculpted, collaborative, and measured intellectual endeavor. Once I had done the initial work of creation, I expected that my students would play the roles I had assigned to them--I had only to stand in the wings directing the growth and development of my creation. What I understand now, and have at last begun to devote serious attention to, is that I must spend as much time inviting students to assume their share of the collaborative burden as I do on the actual construction of my share of that burden.
One specific technique I employ to issue those invitations to collaboration will occupy the remainder of my attention here. The principle which animates this technique is my conviction that class discussions invariably benefit when students spend a few minutes at the inception of every class period doing some thinking on paper. Having students write at the beginning of a class discussion accomplishes three essential tasks: it forces students to focus immediately on the problem or issue or text at hand; it establishes, at least initially, a common agenda for discussion; and, for those students who normally may not feel comfortable contributing to the class discussion, it provides them with something, if only a kind of default statement, which they can offer to the class.
The technique is called a whip sentence. I used it very successfully in the freshman seminar I taught last quarter on existentialism and 20th-century fiction. At the beginning of class I begin writing on the board a sentence which is clearly moving towards a strong interpretive thesis about a novel. For Albert Camus's The Stranger, which explores the philosophical and ethical implications of a seemingly senseless murder committed by the narrator, the sentence runs like this: "[The narrator] Meursault shoots the Arab because . . . ." The students take a few minutes to reflect on this idea and then finish the sentence in their notebooks. After five minutes or so of reflection and writing, I solicit from each student (always leaving students the option to pass) his or her sentence. With the contributing student's help, I characterize each idea in a brief word or phrase on the board. Then I step away and we study the tableau we have all created.
At this point the discussion begins. I initiate the conversation by noting trends or patterns in the solicited ideas. I try to group their ideas into three or four manageable sets: those who attribute the shooting to Meursault's irritation with the heat and the sun, those who see it as an expression of his free choice, and those who see it as a completely meaningless action in a meaningless universe. We struggle to understand how these vastly different interpretations could all arise from the same text. I am continually sending them back to the novel; they must defend their explanations with specific passages from the text. Thus a whip sentence which might seem initially to encourage sterile speculation about the psychological motivations of a fictional character gradually evolves into 1) a discussion about the manifestations of existentialism in this particular novel, 2) a lively debate about interpretive motives and methods, and 3) an exercise in using textual evidence to construct an argument.
In addition to stimulating discussions, this exercise reinforces a point I am continually making to my students about the relationship between thought and expression. Students who don't contribute very frequently in class will occasionally defend their silence to me by explaining that they know what they think about the book, but that they just can't figure out how to say it. What most of us who write and teach for a living understand--and what we have an obligation to communicate to our students--is that we don't really know what we are thinking until we try to articulate it, either on paper or in conversation. The struggle to express our thoughts defines those thoughts; equally significantly, only by articulating our thoughts do we lay them open for the kind of public and private critiques and revisions which clear, critical thinking requires. Forcing students to answer complex questions with half-sentence responses may seem reductive; it is reductive, but those initially reductive responses become a concrete foundation upon which we build our increasingly complex conversations.
Finally, this technique solves another problem which many teachers have with discussion classes. Even those of us who work very hard to let student concerns and ideas determine the specific content of class discussions will have some ideas and themes which we know are essential to a complete understanding of a text or a theory. I am open to the discussion of any number of issues in The Stranger, for example, but any reading of the novel which ignores the philosophical issues raised in Meursault's confrontation with the prison chaplain in the novel's conclusion will be an incomplete one. Concerned about this problem, sometimes teachers-- and I have done this in the past--stifle discussions by setting out a rigid discussion agenda which ensures that the conversation touches upon all the major points.
A technique such as the whip sentence, in
which fifteen students offer fifteen different responses to some
central theme of the novel, allows you to sidestep this dilemma. First,
you still set the initial agenda simply by virtue of the fact that you
create the sentence. Second, with such a variety of responses, you will
invariably find that the students have raised, if only indirectly, at
least some of the issues you wish to discuss. You should begin the
discussion by attending to the dominant themes that the class tableau
raises, but you can eventually guide that discussion into other areas
by occasionally returning to the board: "We haven't yet touched upon
what Brian has implied in his response that . . . " Proceeding in this
fashion ensures the students that you are responding to their concerns,
but also allows you to ensure that the students have engaged with the
aspects of the text that you--as the more experienced reader--know are
essential to a full understanding of the issue at hand.