Must-Read: Harry Brighouse: Why Have Classroom Discussions Anyway?

Must-Read: Harry Brighouse: Why Have Classroom Discussions Anyway?:

I didn’t give any reasons why students actually should discuss….

When I first started teaching I didn’t understand why, either. Here’s why…. Students were–and still are–not like me. Hardly any of them are like me. Not that they are less smart, but they have different ways of learning than mine (most of them having not been treated to a diet of BBC Radio 4 for most of their waking hours during childhood, and not having been surrounded by books and the expectation of reading them, and many of them having had other, more appealing, things to do). I now believe that most people can’t listen, usefully, to even a more expert speaker than I am, for 75 minutes straight…. But the students were–and my current students are–like me in one way…. They need to talk in order to learn. They need to hear the words coming out of their mouths, practice making arguments, giving reasons, and hearing reasons from others to whom they do not feel an immediate inclination to defer (i.e. not just me).

And… I did all these things, and learned a lot from them, just not really in class…. I had weekly tutorials… [and,] much more significant… after just about every lecture I retired to the student refectory with friends and discussed the lecture and/or the readings and/or the essays we were writing. This, I am sure, is where I learned the most. My students don’t have tutorials. And most are not habituated to discussing their classwork outside of class…. So they need to discuss intellectual issues in class, both to do the learning of the discipline-specific content and skills that can only occur through discussion – through practical application if you like – and to get habituated to doing the same outside of class. They need, I think, to be told explicitly why classroom discussion is such an important part of the class, and that they should discuss the material with friends or classmates outside of class….

My previous post… prompted a hallway discussion, during which I revealed that… my ambition is that, on average, I should be speaking for no more than 25% of class time. My colleague looked horrified: “But don’t we want them to learn how to think in a certain way?”. Yes, we do. But how to we get them to think in that way? I am just skeptical that, for most of them, simply being in a room with us, the experts, thinking out loud in that certain way (usually without much expertise, and with no training, as speakers) is optimal for getting them to think in that way….

There’s another reason for wanting discussion…. Students vary a lot in how confident they are…. Confidence, while it correlates with social class, does not correlate tremendously well with competence…. So we have a duty to elicit, by whatever means necessary, participation and discussion from all students, regardless of their predisposition to participate: they all need to learn through discussing, and they all need to learn through hearing others participate….

I’ve also been talking about small classes of 20 or so. Things are different in the large lecture…