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On the suggestion of FacultyShack contributing editor Lyn Fairchild we are starting a new series of articles called "I Wish I Would Have Known That..." In these pieces authors will share things tey would have liked to have known about a teaching topic and then we hope that others will join in to add more to discussion and leverage the power we have withing the combined expertise of our community members. I am going to lead off with things I wish I would have known about leading discussions. When I started teaching, I thought that having a good class discussion would be just like having the discussions I had with my family at the dinner table where everyone wanted to jump in and share, and no one's feeling got hurt because we knew we were all just trading ideas. I quickly realized that class discussions were more difficult to manage and maintain for a number of reasons. Here are a few things I wish I had known sooner. 1) The value of wait time. Early on in my teaching, I was given a small booklet about teaching math. Seeing as I taught English, I almost ignored it, but I decided to flip through and see what it said. I only remember one thing from that small book, but it has stayed with me my whole career, and that is the advice to be patient when there is silence after we ask a question. It seems so simple, but now when I watch new teachers or students leading discussions rapidly answer questions they just asked, I am reminded of that valuable piece of advice. 2) As much as possible, allow kids the chance to make notes and prepare to answer questions. Also in the first few years of my teaching, I attended a Great Books training session. During this workshop, we learned the basic technique of having students mark up passages, ask questions and write reflections in the effort to deepen their thinking but also to allow them to be prepared to take part in discussions. I had felt that kids were just being shy when they didn't enter a discussion but Great Books training helped me see that students (especially shy and/or low skilled students) needed to have resources to help them get involved. Since then I rarely start a discussion without letting students prepare in some way. 3) The last one is to pay close attention to who is doing the talking in class. On some level, I was always aware of this, and in fact, I would have considered myself to be particularly thoughtful about including everyone in discussions, but it wasn't until I took a workshop in critical thinking a few years ago that I realized how much work I still had to do. Simple techniques like having popsicle sticks with each kid's name which get removed form the pile each time that a student talks and only calling on kids whose sticks remain, made recognize how many kids I wasn't hearing from as much as I could. So those are a few things I wish I had known about discussions when I started teaching. What are some of your observations that you could add to this list?
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