Silent Discussion / State-of-the-debate skill-building

This is an activity that is useful in two situations: 1) you have a group either that is reticent to participate in discussion, or where two or three students dominate the discussion and others sit passively; 2) you want to build students’ capacity to reliably describe the state of a debate on a topic, and to feel accountable both about generating their own views and faithfully and neutrally representing the views of others.

How you do it: you’ll need loose paper that the students can pass around, at least one sheet for each student. Write your discussion prompts on the board: the substance and orientation of these will depend on what you are trying to achieve. Prompts could be short passages from a text that you want students to interpret or respond to, or they could be a debatable premise that you want students to take a position on. Assign prompts so that 3-5 students are doing the same prompt. Make sure students indicate at the top of their paper which prompt they are responding to.

Students take as long as they like to respond to the initial prompt they were assigned, aiming to write a short paragraph in response. As soon as they are done, they pass they exchange papers with another student who is also done responding to their prompt, proceeding on the next sheet either to respond to the initial prompt or to one of the foregoing responses. Over the course of 20-30 minutes, an anonymous discussion will accumulate on each sheet of paper, with each prompt generating 4-6 responses by students.

At this stage, you can ask students to report back on the sheet they happen to have in their hands at the end of the exercise. Can they characterize the range of views or reactions? What seems most interesting/compelling/provocative etc.? What questions are they left with? Do students feel their perspectives were represented accurately by other students? Are any perspectives missing? etc. This activity can be a stand-alone effort to enliven seminar discussion, or it can be oriented to build understanding and engagement with a particular concept or argument, or as preparation for characterizing the range of views represented in course texts, for example.