What are classroom discussions?

Classroom discussion can be defined as an oral activity where teachers and students develop together a specific curriculum content or competency through each other ideas. “The purposes of a discussion are to build collective knowledge and capability in relation to specific instructional goals and to allow students to practice listening, speaking, and interpreting, agreeing and disagreeing” (Teaching Works, 2022, May 2). In this sense, students use the ideas, words, explanations, and interaction with their teacher and peers as a resource for their own learning.

Consequently, classroom discussions are not only to answer a question but to establish a conversation with a beginning, a sequence of processes, and an end. What happens during the process is essential to develop well the content and competencies of the curriculum and achieve teaching goals. Different opinions, moderate the interaction, taking turns, etc, matter because these features will be essential to develop the competencies that the teacher wants to develop in their students and explore deeply a content. Therefore, classroom discussions are a teaching and learning process that believes that students will accomplish curriculum goals together, throughout the process of sharing ideas (Teaching Works, 2022, May 2). Well-designed and orchestrated class discussions can help build classroom community.classroom community.

Why are classroom discussions important?

Classroom discussions are important because they develop both academic and non-academic skills in students. Communicating is essential to living in the current society and developing a healthy democracy. Being able to share, justify, defend, listen, and understand diverse perspectives and ideas is one of the most important competencies that human beings use in our current world. Hence, students need to learn these skills to be successful in their adult life.

Moreover, classroom discussions support student development during their school years. Through classroom discussions, students can learn to make sense of complex ideas and organize their thoughts. Students can also develop the confidence to present their views and use evidence to justify them. Finally, classroom discussions can support teachers to reveal students’ conceptions and misunderstandings about a topic, helping them to identify contents and concepts that need to be better explained in a lesson.

However, developing rich classroom discussions is a complex task that may generate several problems if teachers do not conduct the process well. Teachers should know how to value different views and pay attention to each child’s needs. Therefore, the challenge (and secret) is to be conscious of all micro details involved in classroom discussions, as we will show next.

What are the elements to conduct a rich classroom discussion?

Teaching Works Team (2022, May 2) from the teacher education program of the University of Michigan defends that teaching practices should be unpacked in chunks or elements to support novice teachers to develop these skills. In this sense, they divide the task of developing classroom discussion into several parts and elements, detailing what teachers should pay attention to in each part. In the next sections, we will details these steps and elements as well as complement them with additional resources and orientations.

Source: (Teaching Works Team, 2022, May 2)

Elements before starting the discussion

1. Selecting a task:

Teachers should choose tasks, texts, and materials that allow multiple views, discussions, and solutions for a topic/question, encouraging students to explore different possibilities and arguments. Teachers may need to adapt a task to support multiple views and disrupt inequalities.

2. Anticipating student thinking:

Teachers should think about possible questions, mistakes, or understanding that students may have about the topic. This means both activating previous knowledge but also anticipating problems that may deviate students’ attention from the curriculum goals in that classroom discussion.

3. Setting up the task:

Teachers should select the purpose of the activity and prepare the orientations to support students’ work. In this sense, teachers also should plan the moments for students to work independently, in small groups, or with the whole class as well as the resources needed to develop the discussion.

Elements during the discussion

1. Launching the discussion:

• • Introducing the topic: teacher should clarify to students the purposes of the class, and/or activate previous knowledge. A way of starting developing these points is throughout hooks. Teachers may also pose open-end questions/ issues to introduce the topic without restricting the possibility of solutions.
  • Reviewing norms and routines: It is also important to build a classroom environment that makes students feel safe to discuss any topic and expose their opinion and knowledge. In this sense, teachers should build classroom norms and routines and remember these rules before starting a new classroom discussion.

2. Orchestrating the discussion: teachers should pay attention to a couple of elements and tasks that will create thinking routines to explore and deepen their understanding of a topic. The following elements may happen in different orders but they should be part of any thinking routine tool chosen by teachers:

• • Eliciting the discussion: teachers should state the multiple ideas that their students are bringing, helping them to see several points and arguments during the discussion.
  • Orienting students’ attention: teachers should ask to students pay attention to specific ideas and contributions of their peers, encouraging them to learn with each other.
  • Encouraging student participation: teachers should encourage all students to expose their ideas and control who ideas have been highlighted or ignored. It helps that classroom discussion not only become richer since diverse ideas will be developed but also support decreasing inequalities among students.
  • Probing new questions: teacher should put new questions that support students to explore deepen the topic, move to the next learning step process, or summarize what they have discussed.
  • Making contributions: teachers should make contributions or introduce ideas/ concepts that were not brought by students but are essential to achieve the purposes of the discussion. If possible, teachers should connect these new ideas/concepts with have already been discussed validating students’ contributions and establishing connections with previous knowledge.

3. Concluding:

• • Supporting summary: teachers should support students to summarize and remember what has been discussed, helping to establish the most relevant points worked during the class, and issues that they will develop in the next classes.
  • Acknowledge student contribution: teachers should highlight, with examples, how students’ ideas were essential to developing both content and competencies during the class.

Elements after the discussion

1. Evaluating the discussions: the final step is to reflect on what has happened in the classroom discussion to evaluate what works (or not) and how to improve future discussions.

Elements to all moments of the discussion:

1. Maintaining a focus on the instructional point: teachers should always direct each student’s intervention to build some knowledge or example that will help to achieve content and competencies goals.

2. Monitoring students’ work: teachers should pay attention to what students are discussing in their groups and which ideas/ people are been highlighted. In this sense, teachers will be able to use students’ work to develop the content and prevent inequalities or bias in the discussion.

3. Seeing and disrupting patterns that reproduce inequalities: teachers should make interventions to stop patterns that may generate inequalities. These interventions do not need to be explicit. For example, teachers can use a work of a student that normally is not seen as a “good student” to exemplify a topic, helping to improve student status among his/her peers.

4. Recording the representation content: teachers should record (on the board to the whole class or just to themself) what students are saying during the whole process because it can support the teaching and learning process. The notes can be used for different goals or in several moments of the lesson, such as to demonstrate student mental thinking or rationality, and a way of understanding an issue. Teachers should find strategies to make students learning visible. These notes can also support teachers understanding of what are students’ struggles and misconceptions.

What are some classroom discussion formats and strategies?

Even though all these elements are essential to developing good classroom discussions, teachers can use them through different classroom structures,  discussion strategies, and thinking routines. There are many ways of developing all these elements and teachers should consider the age, background, and preferences of their students. In this blog post, the teacher Jenniffer Gonzales also gives some suggestions. You can listen to her ideas in the podcast if you prefer:

How should challenging or high-stakes topics classroom discussions be conducted?

Classroom discussions about challenging or complex topics need extra teachers’ attention because unexpected reactions may appear and some rules should be established to guarantee respect. Thinking on these points University of Michigan prepared a specific orientation on how to conduct classroom discussions about challenging or high-stakes topics. Moreover, Edutopia discusses how classroom norms can support teachers during challenging discussions.

Project Zero (2022, April 30). Project Zero’s Thinking Routine Toolbox. Harvard Graduation School of Education. http://www.pz.harvard.edu/

Liberating Structures (2022, April 30). Liberating Structures Menu. https://www.liberatingstructures.com/ls-menu/

Rochester Community Schools (2022, April 30). Think from the middle. Discourses Strategies. http://www.rcsthinkfromthemiddle.com/discourse-strategies.html 

Teaching Works (2022, May 2). High-Leverage Practices. Teaching Works. https://www.teachingworks.org/work-of-teaching/high-leverage-practices.

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Guest post by Peer Tutor Ariane Faria dos Santos (Ph.D. EDCP), May. 2022.