DISCUSSIONS

Active learning almost always starts with getting students talking. The exercises in this opening section — which include several classic activities with time-honored track records — are designed to do just that. Ranging from a simple around-the-room discussion starter (with a twist) that will work in any classroom, to more complex and in some cases multistage group activities, these exercises are designed to train students in the critical skills that make for effective, even transformative, classroom conversation: how to enter a discussion, how to listen to your peers, how to frame a useful question, how to develop a supportable argument, and how to work together to create an illuminating analytical synthesis.

The section begins with three general, easily adaptable exercises. "The Sixty Second Game" and "Fishbowl" involve everyone quickly and help normalize a discussion-based classroom in which all are counted on to contribute, while "Read, Reread, Close Read" creates a community of careful readers through close listening. All three exercises model discussion as a collaborative activity rather than a sequence of loosely related comments funneled through the instructor. The next three activities use the students' own questions to organize discussion, whether those questions are prepared ahead of time, as in "Put the Question" and "It's Time We Talked," or generated during class itself, as in "Reverse Entropy." Each exercise in this set also helps students recognize what makes a good question in the first place. The final two activities, "Debate" and "Leader, Skeptic, Scribe," turn from pointed questions to arguable answers, asking students to produce and defend interpretive claims about literary texts. Adaptable to any genre and almost any class size, these eight exercises will help turn even the quietest students into lively, engaged participants.

The Sixty Second Game

Vanessa L. Ryan

A classic around-the-room discussion starter with a twist.

Genre: any

Course Level: any

Student Difficulty: easy

Teacher Preparation: low

Class Size: small

Semester Time: any, especially midterm

Writing Component: optional

Close Reading: none to low

Estimated Time: 20 minutes

EXERCISE

Bring a timer to class — a kitchen timer with a bell, or a phone or tablet with a timer application — and introduce your students to "The Sixty Second Game." In this classic "one minute around the table" discussion starter, each student has exactly sixty seconds to comment on the day's reading: no more, no less. The twist is the timer: even if a student is in the middle of a sentence when the bell rings, move on to the next person. Students who complete their comments before the clock is up can recite the alphabet to finish the time (though students usually find they have another thought to share instead).

After you explain the ground rules, invite the students to use their sixty seconds to discuss their favorite or most challenging moment, make a connection to another reading in the course, or comment on a previous student's reflection. Go around the room in order, so that everyone knows when he or she is next. As each student speaks, write a keyword or phrase on the board that captures a salient aspect of each contribution. Group the comments as you record them, underlining observations that are made multiple times, but do not interject your own responses: let the students do all the talking until everyone has had a chance to speak.

Once all the contributions are on the board, open discussion for follow-up comments. Now your own voice can emerge as well. If you like, continue to use the board to track the discussion. At the end of class, return to the board to show students how their insights took shape: pull out the most valuable shared interests, highlighting the larger claims that emerged from their original comments.

REFLECTIONS

This exercise adds a gamelike element to the classroom, and shifts the energy from the instructor to the students. The buzzer makes the exercise fun and leads to a fair amount of laughter; I find that students feel a shared camaraderie as they fight the clock and are "saved by the bell." The key is for the instructor to refrain from speaking for the first twenty minutes or so of class. (The length will vary depending on how many students you have; for larger classes, you can shorten the time for each initial comment to forty-five or even thirty seconds.) Putting keywords and phrases on the board as each student speaks validates and reinforces each student's comment. (For beginning students, it also models the process of note taking.) It is essential to write something on the board for each student.

This exercise is particularly successful when you anticipate a set of groupings in which the initial comments might fall, and then use different quadrants of the board to record those groupings. (For example, you might reserve one quadrant for observations about form, another for comments about themes, another for connections to other works, and so on.) This will also allow you to add any topic you think the discussion has missed, or to dedicate one area of the board to an aspect of the text you want to concentrate on for the rest of the class hour. Anticipating these groupings helps you not only to organize the comments but also to demonstrate later to students how their larger claims took shape. Students are always surprised when you show them that what looks like a messy board actually has an underlying structure, which helps them see that even a freewheeling discussion leads to broader insights.

For example, in a discussion of Sigmund Freud's Dora: A Case of Hysteria in a senior seminar, "The Sixty Second Game" allowed students to voice their initial reactions to the work — some impassioned — and begin the complex work of understanding and analyzing together, without my intervention. As we went around the room, students began with their first responses, particularly what they saw as Freud's coercive interpretations of Dora. Students quickly turned the discussion to consider questions of method, interpretation, and narrative technique, especially Freud's...