I came to the DeeP Collaborative with some experience with student-centered, discussion-oriented pedagogy, due to prior interest and involvement in promoting inclusive and equity-minded pedagogical techniques. But much of that work was very “individual” and a little haphazard, things I’d pursued or developed on my own as a non-expert, based on my own reading and/or workshops that I’d helped develop from the ground up in grad school (because nobody else was doing it at the time!) — So, my participation in the DeeP Collaborative was an excellent opportunity to approach this element of my courses much more systematically, and with the depth and support the Deliberative Pedagogy workshop provided.
There are a wide variety of ways in which I incorporated what I learned from the DeeP Collaborative into my classroom, but I think the most immediately impactful change I made involved how I approached and structured “small group discussions.” It can be challenging to come up with small group discussion assignments that help students move past certain somewhat unfocused, superficial, and/or “disagreement-avoidant” discussion habits, and some of the tools I learned through my participation in the DeeP Collaborative were immediately helpful to that end. So, I’d like to share my experiences with that, in the hopes that it will be useful to any other faculty who would like to promote more productive and satisfying-to-everybody student discussion in their classrooms.
Setting Up The Deliberative Environment
I teach an introductory level class on the Philosophy of Love & Sex, which seemed like a prime candidate for building in more Deliberative Pedagogy techniques. I had already devoted Day 1 of classes to having an open discussion about pedagogy, and about students’ own approaches to learning. I added some material from the Collaborative to the assigned readings for that day, including selections from Aikin & Talisse’s “Why We Argue?” as well as Adam Grant’s “Actions for Impact,” in order to orient students towards a deliberation-focused classroom and establish certain deliberative values for our class.
The Aikin & Talisse reading seemed to have an especially positive effect. In particular, discussing thoughtful disagreement as a form of care and respect really set the tone for the course, and helped get students out of a certain “conflict avoidance” mindset that sometimes keeps them from voicing alternative ideas in the classroom. I believe that this “conflict avoidance” largely derives from an overall positive desire to display respect for differing opinions, so being able to reframe that same respect as expressible throughdisagreement was extremely helpful. I also had students complete a “Discussion Agreements” “quiz” adapted from the DCI’s “Conversation Agreements” after our first-day discussion, in order to make sure students were all on the same page about our values and intentions in our classroom.
Micro-Deliberations
My courses already included in-class small group discussions whenever possible, but my approach to drawing students into productive engagement with each other was mostly limited to trying to come up with really good discussion questions. Very early on in my experience with the DeeP Collaborative, it became apparent to me that what my students were lacking was structure: some sort of guidance through the actual deliberative process. The DeeP Collaborative workshops taught me how to structure these discussions into micro-deliberations, so that they would rise to the level of productive “deliberation” rather than simply casual surface-level discussion.
Drawing on material from our workshops and discussions with other Collaborative members, I developed a simple set of procedural steps for students to follow during the first several weeks of our class, and I talked through them in detail with students the first time we had an in-class micro-deliberation assignment. These steps included:
- Describe your own reaction / initial thoughts (every group member should do this before moving on to Step 2!)
- Diagnose points of agreement and disagreement as a group
- Discuss your reasons for your initial thoughts, and ask about your classmates’ reasons for theirs
- Develop these reasons further by evaluating them against each other, and attempting to reach agreement
- Determine the landscape: have you been able to reach agreement? If so, why/how did you land on this idea, and not possible alternatives? If not, what is the source of disagreement?
Probably the most important of these was step (1) — the requirement that all students in a small group have an opportunity to voice a “gut reaction” thought in response to their assigned discussion question beforeanyone actually articulates whether or not they agree with each other, let alone begins defending their own view. I think that doing this step well, in a classroom environment that values the exploration of disagreements, sets students up for (2)-(5) to happen rather naturally from there.
On a day-to-day level, this one change — giving students specific deliberation-supporting steps to follow, rather than basically just letting them loose on a guiding discussion question — had probably the biggest immediate impact on my classroom environment. Being guided through the process of voicing their own thoughts and exploring disagreements helped them become much more comfortable with doing those things on their own, and by the fourth week of class I largely did not have to remind students of these steps. I think it was also extremely valuable to make “agreement” equally demanding of explanation — this makes it especially clear that the goal is not mere superficial agreement, but thoughtful and considered unity in light of plausible alternatives. It also makes it more clear that disagreement is not a bad thing; we want to be oriented towards agreement in order to avoid a certain sort of empty relativism, but articulating a genuine disagreement well is more valuable (and completes this set of procedures more successfully!) than unconsidered “agreement.”
Final Thoughts
It is worth noting that each step of this procedure may require some guidance, especially the “evaluating reasons” section. If your students are not already well-prepared to engage in some real critical thinking at that stage, you may need to include some further general instruction early on in your class and/or modify the assignment in order to set them up for it. That said, this is something that can be worked out in class as well: students in my classes are required to articulate step (5) to the rest of the class (and me) directly, and if the reasoning or explanation there is not especially good, we can work through it together at that point. But even if there may be some sticking points, giving students a clear procedure that orients them towards deliberation, over and above mere “discussion,” is an extremely valuable and powerful tool.
