Discussing discussions

Over the last year, I noticed in several of my classes that students were more reluctant than usual to participate in discussions. Sure, there had always been students who were more willing to voice their thoughts than others, but this time the silences were more frequent, in small classes as well as in large ones. This may have been a fluke – and one class proved the exception to the rule – but close listening to how students responded to my prompts for more participation gave me the impression that something was actually going on: Students were more afraid than usual of exposing themselves intellectually to the scrutiny of others.

It makes sense that (not only) students have become more reluctant to speak up: Over the last years, the most visible forms of discussion have become cesspools of hostility and public shaming: The insults hurled at Reddit OPs have become proverbial; Twitter blowups are ugly and personal even among people who are nominally adults; and a thoughtless post on a semi-private forum like Facebook may end up making the rounds as a screenshot. As smartphones are only inches away from student hands, a comment in a 10-student class may very well go around the world.

I don't think we could ever expect class discussion to come easily. After all, Karp and Yoel's work, which found that the majority of students delegate participation to a small number of their more engaged fellows, is almost 40 years old! If most students refused to participate in the staid social environment of 40 years ago, how can we expect them to jump at the opportunity today? At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that effective learning requires active engagement with what we learn. How can we create a classroom climate that fosters student participation, that makes it more easy and desirable for students to interact? And how can we make sure students learn how to engage and interact productively?

I don't have it all figured out yet. Luckily there's a bit of literature out there; among freely available resources, I found Blunt and Napolitano's paper on "Leading Classroom Discussions" useful, as well as Todd Finley's piece for edutopia. The Faculty Focus resources on class discussion (which are mainly by Maryellen Weimer) are very useful as well. For those with access to JSTOR or other subscription services, there is Goodman's excellent 1995 College Teaching paper on "Difficult Dialogues".

What I have found important and useful is to start the semester with a class discussion on discussions. Luckily, since I am teaching political science, this discussion usually fits into the course topic, as deliberation is central to many political processes.

The central prompt for the discussion on discussions looks somewhat like this:

Many learning activities in this course involve critical discussions that ask you to exchange ideas with your fellow students. This being a political science course, many of these ideas can be controversial and may lead to disagreement. Disagreement is a good thing, because it helps us learn. However, if disagreement is expressed in ways that upset us and that just leads to fights, we are likely to learn very little. Therefore, we need ground rules that make sure our discussions remain civil and focused on the things we want to learn.

To create discussion ground rules for this course, list three rules that you find important to create civil discussions.

In a small class, I let students write their proposed rules, then collect them on the board and have students discuss the rationale for the rules, which rules are most or least likely to be effective, and why they might work or not. At the end, I'll propose additional rules that I find important and that are missing from the list (here are some possible ground rules, proposed by the good people at Carleton College). I type up the list and circulate it among the students. In a large class, I first break up the discussion into small groups, then have the groups report to the whole class on giant post-its, whiteboards, or the like. Online, I require students to post their lists and respond to at least one other student's list by highlighting what they think are the most and least effective rules.

While this type of discussion on discussions is only a fairly small step, I find it useful, as it usually goes beyond how-to rules on discussion. A recent instance was a discussion in which students quickly agreed that class discussion should be purely rational and arguments should only be based on facts and data. This, in turn, led to a discussion on the role of affective elements in human interactions as well as the question whether the class objectives (or any important objectives, for that matter) could be addressed on a purely factual basis.

But there are more things that need to be done to foster widespread and productive class discussion. The actual substantive discussions later on have to be on important and engaging questions that help students learn; students need activities to reflect on the discussion, to debrief themselves, and to draw conclusions about what they've learned, and they need instructor feedback on whether they are on the right track. They also should have opportunities to break the discussion rules and be called out for it, since otherwise the rules are quickly forgotten. I'm not sure how to get all of this to work, but I think I'm partly on the way. The resources linked to above provide some useful starting points.

Write an inviting syllabus, not trigger warnings

The debate on trigger warnings seems to have run its course for now, with many thoughtful (if you agreed) or outrageous (if you disagreed) contributions. While I agree with many of the thoughtful contributions (see, for example, Ari Kohen, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and David Perry), I'm not too happy about the overall frame of the debate, it's focus on warning students:

Some of the (thoughtful) debate contributors have pointed to the learning hurdles encountered by students with invisible disabilities such as PTSD and the fact that we have to help them overcome these hurdles. While trigger warnings might prevent the encounter with unexpected triggers, the triggers constitute only a portion of these hurdles. Another thoughtful point in the debate is that we should not exclude students who experience discomfort and stress with difficult and conflictual course topics, even if this discomfort does not rise to the level of trauma or other psychological distress. But trigger warnings can very easily exclude those students ("You have been warned: Take this course only if you are worthy of hard questions!"). As a result, trigger warnings are only a partial solution to one problem and make another problem worse.

Instead of adding a trigger warning to the lengthy (thanks, accreditors!) list of rules, instructions, penalties, grading scales etc. that we have to include on our syllabi, why not write a syllabus that helps create an open and inviting course climate? Instead of warning students off, why not invite those who fear conflictual or difficult course material to talk to you about ways to handle the difficult material and succeed in the course? Such a conversation, hopefully at the beginning of the course, is more likely than a trigger warning to encourage students to face the questions that they find threatening and to work with the instructor to do so successfully. In addition, instructors can encourage students to contact disability services and possibly get an access plan if they suspect that their fears are connected to a disability that should be accommodated.

Making your class inviting opens a number of boxes, particularly if you think in terms of inclusive learning, so here are just a few pointers to things that can be done fairly easily. Harnish et al., in an article on Creating the Foundation for a Warm Classroom Climate, focus largely on the type of language instructors use in their syllabi and how they frame the rationale for assignments and explain their own interest in the course topic. They provide a useful list of things that instructors can check when they create their syllabi.

Related to this, with a stronger emphasis on the disciplinary focus of the course, is Ken Bain's Promising Syllabus model, which he summarizes in a short paper (pdf) as well as in his book, What the Best College Teachers Do. Bain's syllabus model encourages instructor and students to enter into a conversation about what students will learn, why they should do so, and how they can document success. If this is successful, the exchange between instructor and student should include a conversation about possible affective and psychological hurdles that the students face.

Among the suggestions most applicable to trigger-warning style situations is one by Christina Petersen, David Langley, and Cheryl Neudauer, in a presentation at the 2013 PODNetwork conference. Petersen and her colleagues propose the inclusion of a paragraph that explicitly invites students to talk to the instructor when they feel overwhelmed and promises that the instructor will try to find a solution with them that helps them succeed. The presentation material used by Petersen and her colleagues, which includes example text for such a paragraph, can be found at the wikiPODia website.

Will filibuster reform lead to more partisan judges?

Observers agree that last week's filibuster reform was a big deal, but nobody knows yet in which way it is going to be big. Speculation abounda - a good example is Judge Wilkinson's argument that collegial interaction in the courts will suffer as future judges do not have to gain bipartisan approval (his column, by the way, includes a beautiful invocation of collegiality in the courts, which all should read).

I am skeptical of this conclusion, for a number of reasons. While the filibuster has been abolished for all practical purposes, there are other mechanisms for minority party involvement and obstruction. As a result, presidents still have incentives to nominate judges that gain at least some bipartisan approval.

First, the Senate's rule change is not a complete demise of the filibuster – it merely reduces the number of votes needed to invoke cloture. As a result, the majority party can now invoke cloture whenever almost all of its members support a nomination. It does not need Republican votes to do so. But according to Senate rules, a successful cloture vote does not necessary lead to an immediate vote on the nomination: it can still be followed by up to 30 hours of debate. In other words, the filibuster has been turned from a block to a delay that can still be costly to the majority's political agenda. If the president can reduce Senate debate to under 30 hours by appointing judges that accommodate minority party concerns, he is likely to do so, at least in many instances.

Second, the "end" of the filibuster for presidential nominations is not the end of the blue slip process, as several commentators noted in recent days (see here, here, or here). When the president nominates a lower-court judge, the chair of the Senate Judiciary committee sends blue forms to the two senators of the nominee's state. If the two home-state senators do not return the blue forms, or return them with negative comments, the Senate judiciary chair traditionally blocks hearings on the nomination, particularly if the objecting senator is from the president's party. Judiciary chairs have differed on whether they let blue slips from opposition senators block nominations; the current Judiciary chair, Patrick Leahy (Vt), has vowed to honor Republican blue slips and requires positive blue slips from both home-state senators before he proceeds with hearings on the nominations.

This begs the question why Senate Democrats, now that they got rid of the filibuster, wouldn't get rid of the blue slip process as well. I think the answer lies in who controls the blue slip process, compared to the filibuster. The cloture vote, which is the tool to end a filibuster, is controlled by the Senate as a whole – 16 senators have to request cloture, and the president pro tempore then holds a cloture vote. The blue slip process, on the other hand, is in the hands of the Judiciary Committee chair. And the Judiciary chair may have institutional incentives beyond those of the majority party leadership, or even the average majority party member. Leahy may find that he can do his job much more effectively if he has a minimum level of goodwill from the Republican members of his committee, with whom he interacts more closely than with other Senate Republicans. As a result, it is at least thinkable that Leahy will continue to honor negative (or missing) blue slips from Republican home-state senators, particularly if the objections raised by those senators are reasonable.

So I think that it is quite likely that judicial appointments will be less partisan than some of the doom sayers expect, and they will not be more partisan than previously appointed judges: The appointing president's and the home-state senators' ideologies have been pretty good predictors of how federal judges will decide in cases with politically definable outcomes &ndsh even before the filibuster change.

Preface questions, ctd.

More responses to questions that incoming freshmen had during the Preface session at the beginning of the semester (Preface is JMU's program to welcome incoming freshmen and -women; it includes a first-year reading program). I asked them to leave me note cards with their questions. Here are some more answers.

Respectful and ethical minds - what's the difference?

This is a good question: the two ideas that Gardner talks about are clearly related. The respectful mind points to the habit of showing respect to people with different beliefs, traditions, perspectives, etc., while the ethical mind points to the need to "act on the basis of responsibility." Obviously, one could argue that being respectful is an ethical requirement and that these two types of mind are closely related (or the respectful mind is part of the ethical mind). Gardner wrote an entire book on his idea of different minds, so I suspect that he goes more in-depth on these types of questions.

I have to admit that I find it dangerous to over-emphasize respect. True, I think it is important that we learn to be respectful towards people with different perspectives, beliefs, opinions, ways of thinking, etc. etc. Particularly as a student of American politics, I find that the respectful mind is too little exercised in many public debates. But ridicule has its place in public discourse as well. Sometimes ridicule is more effective to expose lazy reasoning, stupidity, or bad taste. And in many dictatorships, respectful criticism is prohibited, while ridicule can often slip undetected through censorship.

I think that, when it comes to respect, the important thing is to learn when to be respectful and when to ridicule what deserves to be ridiculed. That's to a large part an aesthetic question – a question of good taste, of proportion. Interestingly, that's something that Gardner does not mention in his article.

How important is the Preface class, compared to other classes?

For me, the main importance of Preface, JMU's first-year reading and discussion program, is to prepare incoming students for their work at JMU. I suspect that the way we learn at JMU is quite different from learning in many high schools – students are expected to be more responsible for their own learning, they have to develop their own interests and pursue them, they have to understand what constitutes a good and fulfilling education and make sure they get it. Professors, librarians, and other people working with students provide many opportunities for students to learn and grow, and students have to figure out how to take those opportunities. The readings and discussion in the Preface class meeting were designed to let students reflect on what is learning, what is knowing (and not knowing), what is part of a good education, and what are the reasons for seeking an education. We hope that the readings provided students with ideas about learning that help them achieve their goals in a variety of disciplines. In this sense, the Preface class is very important, even though it may not provide any specific knowledge about particular classes that students are going to take, say, in their majors later on.