Class discussion is cornerstone of so many lessons and subjects. We want to engage students in airing and sharing ideas, listening to each other as we explore an area of the curriculum together or reflect on a common experience of some kind.

Done well, class discussion allows students to formulate and express ideas – helping them to develop and deepen their understanding, linking ideas together and gaining confidence with the use of the language needed to communicate them. It also allows the teacher to hear what students think, thereby learning more about them and what they know – it’s a form of formative check for understanding.

However, without appropriate attention to structures and routines, quite often class discussion can be one of those activities that creates a surface illusion of learning, with all the energy and buzz of student talk and teacher-student interaction, whilst, actually, only directly benefitting a handful of students.  The rest are observers rather than participants. The teacher might feel that they had a great class discussion because of the quality of contributions they sampled, but the view from the back suggests that too many students weren’t involved, couldn’t follow, didn’t get to share their ideas and didn’t get any practice or the chance to consolidate the ideas exchanged by the others.

The key challenges as I see them are listed here:

• Insufficient knowledge to engage or sustain: it’s hard to follow a discussion if it is run based on the assumption of knowledge that some students don’t have. This includes the key words in the question. 
• The illusion of participation – the dominant few and the silent majority. In very many class discussions, most students don’t say anything. That’s a problem if practising formulating arguments and speaking are important to the learning.
• Ensuring good ideas can surface without inhibiting others – if you only allow students who are chosen by the teacher to speak and share, some students’ excellent ideas might never be heard. Conversely if those with the best ideas dominate – the weaker students are quickly inhibited, don’t volunteer and get even less practice.
• Keeping the energy up: after a few exchanges, the energy can flag if the whole thing is one person at a time with multiple students opting out, drifting away and losing attention, not expecting to participate.
• Sustaining and deepening the line of thought: if each student only says what’s in their head without having listened to previous responses, the discussion can be shallow rather than deep.
• The problem of transience: everything said is immediately in the past. Students who struggle will find it hard to remember the key points even if they could follow and understand at the time. The content of a rich verbal discussion can be lost rapidly.
• Making meaning and checks for understanding. As a discussion progresses, we can’t simply assume that everyone listening is making sense of it in their own head if they don’t themselves get the chance to rehearse the argument or line of reasoning.

Our Class Discussion Walkthru was written with these issues in mind and, we hope, provides one way to run a room so that the challenges are overcome.

1. Set the question with purpose and thinking time.

A good discussion question has some substance and structure. It could be about solving a problem, expressing opinions, analysing a text or explaining a phenomenon. In each case framing the discussion as seeking answers to a question is helpful. Adding structure to this by specifying some form for the response can provide a helpful scaffold. e.g. 

• What is the impact of an earthquake in a low-income city? Consider economic, social and environmental aspects.
• What are the main features of the setting in the story that shaped the character’s feelings? (Think of at least three and explain the effect they each had.)
• What do you think the main pros and cons are to introducing the ULEZ and to what extent do you support it? 

These questions require more than a quick-fire response and will generate multiple different ideas. In each question, it pays to check for understanding of each key term – sampling a few students to give their explanations. It also helps to give them a resource to refer to if needed. The discussion is about exchanging ideas – it’s not a test, yet. Let them refer to the textbook or the key diagrams as a prompt. We’re rehearsing here, not performing. Give thinking time – silent thinking time, so everyone has a chance to consider their own ideas before they hear what their classmates think.

2. Pairs to start then open up.

In one school I visited they called this the ‘little share’. Using the routine of Think Pair Share, allows every individual student to talk and share their ideas. They call get to practise using the terminology. It helps lubricate students’ minds in the safe zone of their pair prior to the ‘big share’ in the whole class. I’ve seen this happen so often – a discussion that starts off at whole class level being initially stilted and awkward only to be loosened up after switching to a round of Think Pair Share. 

If you want every individual student to be involved in discussing, you can’t do it without some kind of small unit structure. But – beware the ‘discuss on your tables’ shortcut. Just watch as table of 4-6 students attempts a discussion. Nearly every time, some of the students don’t speak. You just get dominant people dominating their groups. Pairs is the best way to ensure every student gets time to say something. Make it explicit that the pairs will then feed into a whole class discussion, with some cold calling to maximise attention and commitment to the discussion. 

As the pairs start talking, stand in a position to scan and supervise to make sure they are all talking. Then circulate; get around the back. Listen in and keep people on task.

3. Mix up cold call and hands up.

After the pair share period, then you move into the whole class discussion phase: the ‘big share’! (You don’t have to call it that of course.. but I quite like it!) Here’s really good to use the full Cold Call routine – because it sets up a series of mini exchanges. Our Cold Call isn’t a series of monosyllabic responses; it suggests dialogues. You make everyone think as you move from person to person. 

After a few responses, then you want to open up the room to see if there are other ideas lurking that you haven’t heard. This is when you ask for Hands Up. Hands up if you’ve got something else to add that we haven’t heard yet..  This works brilliantly for bringing in those students who are bursting with ideas but have been kept waiting a while as we listen to other voices. It makes them listen to the other ideas first and also prevents them from dominating. They get their chance. So the routine is: Pairs, then Cold Call, then Hands Up. Works a dream. 

4. Add, Build or Challenge

An important element in the follow-ups is for students to listen to each other. One way to do this is to insist that a follow-up must either Add, Build or Challenge. It’s a good filter for students checking out and then repeating their original thought or someone else’s answer verbatim.  I’ve seen a superb example of this in Year 4 recently, supported by the use of stems. When asked, children were responding with ‘I’d like to challenge something Joseph said, because in my opinion…… ’; ’Building on Aisha’s answer, I would also add that…..’. 

5. Summarise & Record

Finally, even if you’ve done all of this so far, there’s a huge risk that the ideas shared are tenuous, ephemeral and transient. The least confident students who only just followed the exchange of ideas won’t remember it for long… if at all… unless you make a deliberate attempt to summarise key points and record them in a form they can revisit. You can do this during a discussion or afterwards but it really helps to organise the ideas into a form students can then use. If you have created a scrawly messy board of jottings, that might satisfy your artistic sense of creative energy.. but it’s a nightmare for anyone needing to grapple with difficult ideas from a low starting point. Take time to organise, consolidate, repeat, reinforce… checking for understanding as you go. Actively seek out key students to check how well they’ve followed the discussion, don’t just assume their silence listening face meant they were with you. This way the lovely rich organic-seeming discussion you just had can translate into secure, accessible knowledge for everyone, not just those who were driving the input in the first place.

As with anything, Class Discussion can follow any number of paths – this is just one way to express it. However, I do feel that, in general, it’s an area of practice that could be a lot stronger. I”m convinced that in the absence of structures of this nature, the extremely common whole class format, creating a buzzy energy of a great exchange between the teacher and 6, 8, 10, 12 students. . can still manage to leave out most students and that’s probably not ok!