Questions, digressions, and classroom discussion

Hello everyone,

Here is another reprint of an email I wrote previously. My intention was to talk about managing questions and answers in a free-ranging discussion. How do you keep the discussion on track? How do you manage seemingly unrelated questions?

Here is the idea:

Someone said something to me once that made me think that effective classroom discussion is sometimes like playing Tetris.

You know the game Tetris don't you? Little shapes made up of variously colored boxes float from the top of a video screen, and the player tries to flip the shapes around so that they will fill in empty space, or so that their colors will match other colored shapes. The object is to have the shapes fill the screen with no empty places. I am often hypnotized watching my daughter play.

Effective classroom discussions can be like Tetris in the following ways:

1. Student comments and questions are unpredictable. They seem to drop out of nowhere sometimes. I confess that, if you have only one prep, by the end of the day you might have an idea of some of the questions or ideas that might be brought up. This means that you are surprised, usually, only the first two periods of the day at most. After you teach the same lesson over a number of years, you get an idea of the sorts of questions that might be asked, and you can prepare for them. After teaching for more than 20 years, I could practically guarantee certain questions would be asked at certain times. This means that, after you have taught a certain lesson more than once, you may use a certain amount of manipulation in the course of the discussion. (Whenever I announced in my film classes that I don't watch "R" rated movies, someone would always ask me why, which led to a good discussion on the nature of the rating system, marketing, and the tension between aesthetics and morals.) But if you allow free inquiry, which I think is important in class-wide discussions, then you must know that some students will ask questions or bring up subjects that are not obviously connected with the discussion in hand. Personally, I think ALL questions must be answered, and none should be ignored or disrespected, but that leaves the discussion open to enormous digressions, which leads to similarities 2 and 3.

2. You need to fill in the gaps while under time constraints. Class only lasts as long as it lasts. You can't fail to make connections.

3. You sometimes need to flip the shapes around to make them fit. In Tetris, different colors and shapes are dropping all around you. In class, wide varieties of subjects are flying around. I want to talk about sonnets, my students want to talk about bisexuality. I can use the non-issue of Shakespeare's sexuality to turn the students back to sonnets so fast that they hardly know they've ventured away from fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. (The fact that the question of Shakespeare's sex life in the sonnets is unanswerable, but the sonnets provide all sorts of interesting commentary on a wide variety of human interactions--both sexual and non-sexual--makes for very interesting sessions with these 400-year-old poems.) In the meantime, students are close reading more than they've done in their lives in an effort to keep up their side in the discussion.

I will have approached the sonnets, by the way, with very specific objectives in mind. As soon as I open up a class-wide discussion or inquiry into the sonnets, however, I find that the class is led in ways that don't necessarily fill my objectives. I need to find ways to make the connections. The suggestions in the previous paragraph may help fulfill some of my objectives including close reading of difficult texts or decoding of compound/complex sentences. Still, I may also have objectives involving the structure of poetry, scansion (it was an AP class), and autobiography; or I may have an integrated vocabulary lesson built in (including lessons in connotation). I need to use the discussion to fill those objectives. It requires me to keep the objectives firmly in mind while following the potentially wide-ranging discussion.

My reward for allowing digressions then making connections, is that the connections become very powerful because students make them based on previous knowledge or associations that I would have been unaware of until I began the discussion.

It really is like a game, and, when it works, it's exhilarating.

Jeff Combe