Teaching Deliberation

Josh Otlin—Hudson High School, Hudson, MA

Controversial issues in the classroom provide teachers with wonderful learning opportunities fraught with daunting challenges. There is no single foolproof way to manage conversations on controversial issues. Fortunately, there are simple, tested models for promoting quality deliberative dialogues in the classroom. Many teachers across the country use Socratic Seminars (or similar exercises) to teach the skills of deliberation via a structured, evaluated discussion. Seminars are an excellent tool for teaching deliberation and training students to make deliberation the norm in classroom discussions.

The Seminar helps teach deliberation because the teacher communicates very specific expectations for participation to the students and holds them accountable to those standards. Often times, these expectations are significantly different from what our students are accustomed to.Unfortunately, most students are trained to believe that "participating" in a discussion means raising their hand to respond to the teacher's question or speaking when called upon. The first step in teaching deliberation is helping students redefine "participation" in discussions. In a Seminar, the standards might look like this:

The teacher should also articulate problematic types of participation:

Once students understand the expectations (as with all teaching, a good model goes a long way—teachers can use scripted skits or a video of a good deliberative dialogue), they need an opportunity to practice the skills in a low-risk, low-stakes environment.

The first time we ask students to deliberate, we need to provide them with questions and a text that they can easily access and one that intelligent people will answer differently. During the fall of 2004, I asked my 9th grade Civics students to watch videos of presidential campaign advertisements and discuss the implicit messages in each piece. I divided my 24 students into 2 groups and each student partnered with a peer from the other group. Then, half of the students sat in an "inside" circle with me, and their partners sat in a larger "outside" circle directly across from the participants in the "inside" circle. The students on the "inside" discussed the implicit messages in one of the advertisements and the students on the "outside" listened and documented their partner's performance on a simple rubric. After the first dialogue, the partners met briefly to discuss the participant's performance and then the roles were reversed for the second dialogue. After the second dialogue finished, the students completed a brief self-evaluation that I later commented on and returned to the students.

Once students understand the format and expectations for the Seminar, the teacher can modify the rubric to emphasize certain skills for the class or to differentiate expectations for individual students. For example, my 9th graders usually want to address their comments to me and are wary to challenge other students' ideas. To help break these habits, I "weight" certain types of participation more heavily than others and sometimes penalize certain types of behavior:

Points Type of Participation
3 points Student challenges an idea with a question or a comment
2 points Student addresses a comment to the entire group
-1 point Student addresses a comment to the teacher alone

As the year progresses and the students' abilities and needs change, so does the rubric. In addition, my role as the teacher evolves with each Seminar.

In our first Seminars of the year, I ask a lot of questions to move the conversation forward and to invite reluctant participants to contribute. Over time I become increasingly quiet, and if I do my job well, I can ultimately remain silent after I pose the opening question to the students. With regular practice and feedback, the students are able to manage the dialogue and I am able to focus on evaluation.

For these dialogues to work well, the teacher needs to pose good questions, provide quality texts, build trust in the class, clearly articulate standards, generate student investment, and provide high-quality feedback. As teachers, we try to do this every day, regardless of the type of activity or assessment. The Seminar is an easy fit for our classrooms and can complement many of our established activities and projects (a Seminar is a great way to explore a "5th option" after a Choices simulation).

By regularly incorporating Seminars into the class routine, we can train students to make dialogue the norm. We need to let students know that we expect dialogue to be the modus operandi in class and we should hold them accountable on our regular class participation rubrics. If we are successful, class becomes a seminar, just like an upper-level undergraduate or graduate course.

Universities and teachers dating back to Socrates have used the seminar as a teaching tool because they know it works. Of course, adolescents need to be trained in this type of learning and the expectations need to be appropriate for the age group. Given that, adolescents can effectively dialogue in a seminar-style class and can learn a great deal from this type of methodology. As our friends at The College Board say, "if it's good enough for the best, it's good enough for the rest."