Early this year, after the pandemic had moved my classroom online, a student asked if we could try “silent meetings” in a course I was teaching. At first I assumed that, like many of us, he was just ...

Provide (verbally and on the syllabus) clear guidelines for participation. Discuss them beforehand, stick to them, and enforce them during class. Think about what active participation means to you and ...

One of Kevin Gannon’s favorite class discussion activities doesn’t involve much talking. Inspired by complete-the-story games in which players each write a line of a tale that builds off a previous ...

Academic instructors, hired for their content expertise, are rarely trained in skills like classroom facilitation or community-building. But successful collaborative learning requires a degree of ...

The new question of the week is: What are the best ways to organize and lead classroom discussions? Part One featured responses from Rita Platt, Adeyemi Stembridge, PhD, Jackie Walsh, Doug Lemov and ...

This seems to be the common rule in most classrooms. It is easily explained in a lecture setting. Indeed, everyone must be focused on what the professor is saying. A discussion would only create a ...

A few years ago, we hired an adjunct professor to teach a three-hour night class. After a few weeks, he came to us in frustration because he couldn’t get the students to discuss the material, and when ...

Why Are Class Discussions Challenging? There are a variety of reasons that class discussions are challenging. It’s not necessarily just students being “lazy”. There could be a lot of real issues and ...

Excerpted from Building Better Citizens: A New Civics Education for All by Holly Korbey. A Twenty-first Century Guide to Politics in the Classroom In a four-year study of classroom political ...

Student diversity enhances learning and can present both challenges and opportunities for discussion leadership. Some of these challenges/opportunities relate to identities that may be visible (e.g., ...

Thousands of high school students have participated in demonstrations against police killings of unarmed Black people. Some students are demanding that their school districts adopt anti-racist ...

Alabama lawmakers on Wednesday advanced GOP-backed legislation to ban discussion of "divisive concepts" in classroom lessons and worker trainings on race and gender. The bill would prohibit a list of ...