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Ideas for Discussion-Based Activities
- Assign a weekly learning journal for students to share their reflections on lessons and readings. Encourage students to respond to one another. Questions might include:
- What was the most important thing you took away from our readings this week?
- What was the most beneficial learning outcome you achieved through class activities this week? And what best helped you reach that outcome?
- What are you struggling with most? (Concept or other issue.)
- How could this lesson be better delivered to next quarter's class?
- Create a discussion forum called “Share” with topics for key themes in your course where students can post links relevant to the course. Ask them to briefly describe how their submissions are relevant and to rate credibility and quality of presentation.
- Use forums to facilitate student peer review of draft papers. Encourage constructive criticism and graceful acceptance of suggestions.
- Assign collaborative projects to small groups and ask them to use private group discussions to manage their efforts and ideas. Assign roles such as moderator or summarizer. Have the groups post their finished work in an open discussion forum for other groups to see. (Another assignment could be evaluating other groups' finished projects.)
- Use private group discussions to help teams of students prepare for in-class debates for or against an issue.
- Use discussions for role-playing exercises. For example:
- Ask students to choose a historical person to research and then participate in a discussion as that person. Students studying the Byzantine Empire might choose a historical figure from that period and then answer questions from a reporter for BNN (Byzantine News Network) about their role in the event, such as who they blamed/credited and how they would have done things differently. After students’ responses are posted, they became reporters who ask follow-up questions of their classmates
