36 Engaging students in discussion
What strategies did you use for engaging students in discussion and responding in the moment?
BF: When I wrote my synchronous lectures, I deliberately built in open-ended questions to allow for student response, encouraging them to use the Chat or to unmute their mic when prompted, to bring those voices in. I usually start with some low-stakes, very short-answer questions to get them going, such as, “What genre would you say this story is?” without asking why, and then following up with, “What made you think/at what point did you realize this story would have an uncanny or horror element?” Then, I would raise larger questions later. I had my fantastic senior TA monitoring the Chat during synchronous lectures, and I’d either stop periodically or she’d interject to tell me student contributions, so I could engage with those too.
My TAs and I also talked about which strategies were working in tutorials, especially because in the middle of winter during a pandemic no one seemed to have any energy to spare — including the teaching team. Playing music, using pop culture parallels, and think-pair-share collaboration sometimes helped, where possible.
EG: I tried to build at least two small activities into each lecture, which might be completed individually, crowdsourced via chat/audio, or a combination of both. We didn’t use the Groups function very often because of the size of our class, but I would have different segments of the class work on different things (e.g.: folks with a first name starting with A-K, work on question 1, etc.). In one memorable class we explored the concept of ideology by each sketching a classroom; I had students share the features of their drawing via chat, while I drew a consolidated image using Zoom’s whiteboard feature.
I definitely need to work on responding more meaningfully in the moment (i.e., beyond recapitulating a student’s point and thanking them for the contribution). It’s a natural, but paradoxical, consequence of caring about the course: you want the course to go well and for students to be engaged, but all that important energy can sometimes make it difficult to actually be in the course discussion. One strategy that helps me is to take very brief notes (basically 2 or 3 keywords) while students are speaking, which keeps me focused on the actual discussion. In the past I’ve done this on the whiteboard in a tutorial room (no names, just the most basic of jot notes to capture the arc of our conversation), and invited students to take a photo at the end.