Creating Dialogue in the Classroom

One of the most important goals – and greatest challenges – of educators is to create a learning environment in which the students participate actively in their education by becoming engaged with the course material. An effective way to promote active participation is through dialogue in the classroom. Unfortunately, many students, trained by years of passive education and cowed by the fear of making mistakes, are extremely reluctant to enter into dialogue in the classroom. So, how do you get students to begin to actively engage in substantive dialogue? We argue that the essential pre-requisite for classroom dialogue is an atmosphere of trust.

Q and A sessions are undoubtedly the most common way in which we expect to create dialogue in the classroom. Instructors can invite students to ask questions at any time during the lecture or set aside a specific time for questions. The choice to allow students to interrupt during lectures, however, will help in building an active learning environment because students can engage with the instructor throughout the lecture. It is also important to remember that the instructor can ask questions of the students too.

Think / pair / share is a technique that allows students to interact with a peer to work out a problem or question that the instructor has assigned. Students are asked to work with a partner in order that the students can actively work through problems. Think / pair / share works in large classroom settings because students can simply turn to their neighbour to begin this exercise. However, large classes also have their drawbacks because it is often difficult to ensure that students are actually discussing the problem and not last night‘s party.

Small group discussions also work to create interaction between peers. Again, this may be an opportunity to get students to work through a single problem or for the instructor to design different problems for each group. The instructor may have each group share their findings with the whole class at the end of the discussion.

Informal debates may begin in a classroom quite unexpectedly. They should be encouraged and the instructor should take the time to discuss the debate, outlining the different positions including flaws in reasoning, incorrect assumptions or facts. Make sure the students understand that free flowing debate is not tangential to lecture material. Some students assume that the only ―voice that matters is that of the instructor. Take the time to point out how students may have used ideas / concepts from the course to argue a point.

Formal debates are a good tool to get students engaged in both careful research and presentation techniques. The competitive nature of debate can often spark student interest. The instructor needs to set out the debate rules, to expect that research is done beforehand preferably demonstrated through an assignment given to the instructor before the debate. One technique for ensuring that students take the debate seriously is to ask that students dress appropriately on debate day.

Individual and group presentations are good tools to teach the important skill of oral communication. For some students presentations are a joy; for others presentations are wrought with anxiety and fear. There are two vital parts of a presentation, first there must be clear, well researched content and second, they must be organized and clear. It is important to help students understand that presentations cannot be all ―bells and whistles‖ without substance. Instructors may want to ask the students to design the grading rubric for the presentations. Students are likely to put the emphasis on the content when they are asked ―what makes a good presentation‖. A presentation may have lots of bells of whistles but if the content is lost or unclear the audience will feel that they have not learned anything.

Oral examinations can be a very effective way of determining whether or not the students can articulate ideas they have learned in the course. It becomes very clear that a student has done the course readings when you are having a one-on-one discussion with them about the course. When the exam is designed as an open ended interview session with a number of critical questions along the way, the instructor can often gauge what aspects of the course had the most impact on the student. Two notes of caution: first, it is necessary to have a grading rubric template that is completed at the end of each exam otherwise it is very difficult to remember individual student responses; second, it is necessary to mix up the questions so that students do not share the exam questions. This also means that the instructor has to be very clear about what the students should be getting out of the course (i.e. what is examinable) so that there is no basis for students to say that they got ―hard questions whereas others got ―easy ones.