MANY THANKS to Bend Senior High’s Jim Bright and his intern teacher Jordan Weinstein for sharing their protocol for graded, virtual classroom discussions. They’ve had great success with it, not only as a stand-alone activity, but have seen its positive impacts in overall, increased classroom engagement with all levels of learners.

To Begin: I start the class with a warm-up activity to activate students’ background knowledge.  I have found great success with the “Waterfall chat” format shown below.

After a stated amount of time, the instructor says, “SEND,” and students submit their responses all at once.  I have gotten high engagement using this strategy (23/27 participants in the lesson above), and I believe it is because it takes the pressure off of individual students to “put themselves out there” on the chat where everyone can read and scrutinize their answer.

After introducing two short primary source texts and some background information, I send students into breakout rooms for 10 minutes with a set of guiding questions to prepare for the graded discussion.  It is helpful to show students the slide below before sending them into breakout rooms, so that they understand what they will be asked to do and can maximize their time.

Once students return from breakout rooms, I hand off the reins to them.  I share my screen to display the slide above so students could refer to it as needed.  I take data by recording on a class roster each time a student spoke and the nature of their comment.  I divide my roster into four columns using the guidelines above: “Respectfully disagrees,” “Builds on a classmate’s comment,” “Connects to the text/supports with evidence,” and “Other.”  Students often fall into the “other” category when they make substantive comments that rely on background knowledge rather than the primary source texts we looked at in class.  Again, I make use of the chat function to give real-time feedback to students, which is a feature of virtual learning that is superior to in-person instruction.

The discussion lasts about 20 minutes.  I resist intruding on the conversation and find that when I am about to make a comment to guide the discussion forward, a student jumps in before me and takes the words out of my mouth.

(In hindsight, I would give students more time for the discussion, as we get feedback from some students that it is hard for them to get a word in edgewise.  Even so, we had 15/27 participants make at least one substantive contribution to the discussion.)

At the end of class, I share the data of who had spoken so students would know if they got credit or if they needed to submit a written response.  We also use the chat to have students rate the usefulness of the discussion on a scale of 1-10.  (Our lowest score was a 5 and we averaged between a 7-8.)

We have found since doing this lesson that our students are quicker in live classes to speak on the microphone or in chat, which was an unforeseen lasting benefit of this lesson.

SUPPLEMENTAL RESOURCES:

http://blog.online.colostate.edu/blog/online-teaching/5-discussion-ground-rules-for-the-online-classroom/ – BLOG POST – Originated at Colorado Statue University, here are some tips for facilitating asynchronous discussions. According to the post, asynchronous discussions fall into unhelpful or inappropriate routines quickly, as students generally have markedly different views of appropriate text comments. It is worth a teacher’s time to lay some netiquette ground rules and to monitor the first few closely.

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/how-to-make-your-virtual-discussions-engaging-effective-and-equitable-in-eight-steps/ – BLOG POST – Written for higher education faculty, this post provides a solid, thoughtful list of preparation items to attend to when preparing and executing virtual discussions effectively.