In the classroom, teachers usually find that students fail to remain focused and think actively. This relatively low classroom participation also affects students’ reading and writing abilities. Therefore, it has been a common concern of educational researchers and practitioners worldwide to understand how students’ initiative can be stimulated and how students can be fostered to become self-driven readers, thinkers, and writers. Catherine Snow is an expert on language and literacy development in children. She focuses on how oral language skills are acquired and how they relate to literacy outcomes. Her current research projects cover the age groups of early childhood and adolescence and are closely related to teaching practice, including the development of curriculum tools to support teachers in adopting innovative classroom practices. Discussion-based instruction is a major achievement in her work in the area of adolescent language and literacy. Research has found that discussion-based instruction can significantly increase students’ engagement in the classroom. In this article, Snow introduced to educational practitioners the idea that discussion-based instruction plays a unique role in elementary and secondary classrooms with numerous students, intensive examination pressure, and heavy teaching loads. The following is based on an interview with Professor Catherine Snow, who consented to have this work shared for publication.
Start of discussion-based instruction research
Deng: Professor Snow, we know you and your team have led the development of Catalyzing Comprehension Through Discussion and Debate, a research project on argumentation-focused curriculum instruction for adolescent U.S. students. Why did you and your team choose to focus on argumentation among many potential topics?
Snow: How we came to focus on discussion-based instruction actually underwent a tortuous process closely related to teaching practice. Back then, we were working on a study with the Boston public schools, and we were trying to help raise the reading comprehension skills of middle-grade students aged 11–15. As reading comprehension is a macro area, our main task was to find a target for intervention in which the teachers believed. This is because the teachers were going to have to implement this, and we were doomed to fail if we gave them a solution for a problem they did not think they had. Through a thorough review, we identified a key problem in reading comprehension to be academic vocabulary, a fact widely accepted among teachers. Therefore, we devised an intervention for academic vocabulary that we attempted to make consistent with research findings on learning vocabulary. One of the major research findings is that vocabulary use and acquisition are positively correlated. In other words, students learn words better if they use them. How, then, do we encourage students to actually use new words? This was our problem related to practice.
We struck upon the idea that if the words were embedded in discussible questions, and the students could discuss those questions, then they would have to use these words naturally. For example, regarding the topic “Should a parenting license be mandatory?” if you want to discuss that, you have to use the word “mandatory,” and you may come to understand something about the meaning of the word and remember it.
We had designed the debate piece of the curriculum primarily as a mechanism to ensure the students had a chance to use the words. However, when we conducted the in-class observations, we found that the debate piece of the curriculum structure was powerful in generating student engagement. To prevail in the debate, students worked hard to formulate their thoughts and collect evidence in support of those thoughts. A seemingly insignificant debate in the classroom can actually wield tremendous power. Thus, we concluded that maybe we should focus more on the argumentation/discussion component. Rather than thinking of this as primarily a vocabulary intervention, we started to think of it more broadly, as an academic language curriculum that focused on discussion and argumentation. This is the direction in which we expanded and developed the curriculum.
Characteristics and applicability of discussion-based instruction
Deng: Both Chinese and English language teaching in Chinese classrooms also place considerable emphasis on vocabulary. The expansion of curricula from vocabulary to argumentation that you mentioned is also extremely inspiring for Chinese teaching practice and research. However, most classroom models with which we are familiar still center on teachers’ lectures, during which they ask questions and evaluate students’ responses. Moreover, the number of students in Chinese classrooms is usually much larger than that in the United States. Do you think that discussion-based instruction can still be effective under such circumstances? What are the unique characteristics and values of discussion-based instruction compared to lecture-focused curriculum instruction?
Snow: Discussions and argumentation can be used in classrooms, I think, for many different purposes. The purpose we focused on was developing students’ critical thinking and language skills as well as their control over academic analytic language, the kind of language that makes one successful in a debate. The use of debate or argumentation can motivate students to read more purposefully to seek evidence in the text they are reading and formulate those arguments orally and in subsequent written essays. Therefore, argumentation, I think, works reasonably well. For some purposes, lectures can work well. They can be effective in transmitting information, and some students are receptive to this type of information transmission. Nevertheless, one of the challenges in U.S. schools is that we are trying to reach an increasingly diverse student body, including much greater diversity in language proficiency, many immigrant students, and a high percentage of nonnative speakers of English. Thus, ensuring that they are actually connecting to the material and processing it deeply is hard. If you are only giving lectures, although these students may look like they have understood everything, you have no way of knowing what they have missed and what they have picked up until the final test at the end of the semester. Hence, to be more responsive to this wide variety of students, we think it is important to include some discussion in classrooms.
This is not necessarily to say that it should be 60 min out of a 60-min class. Obviously, teachers have the information they need and want to impart, and some can do so extremely well. However, I think many studies in higher education classrooms in the U.S. have shown that even in a lecture class, taking a 3-min break every 15 min and having students talk to each other about what they have just heard is major support for processing, monitoring one's learning, and remembering more effectively. Therefore, the real issue here is to keep students active in their learning. There are various ways to do that, and discussion and argumentation constitute one such way.
Deng: Motivating and keeping students engaged and involved in the content are indeed strengths of discussion-based instruction. However, teachers may wonder how they will know what students are saying if they talk simultaneously in a classroom.
Snow: We have several tips. One mechanism that has been widely used, such as in teaching physics at Harvard by Professor Eric Masur, is a side-by-side chat about a specific question. The students must agree on an answer that they submit using a clicker or some other way. As students working together shoulder the same responsibility to submit an answer, both are held accountable for solving the problem rather than chatting freely. Once the teacher receives a real-time answer, they can also know the extent to which the entire class understands certain issues and adjust the teaching accordingly. For example, if 80% of the students give the wrong answer, the teachers will realize that they should go back and explain that part again. Therefore, I think it is a way of conducting a formative assessment of the effectiveness of the lecture method to insert numerous such checks.
Deng: It seems we can learn many skills from discussion-based instruction. Next, we would like to discuss an unavoidable topic in instruction: exams. We know that curricula and instruction are usually subject to the influence of entrance exams in the U.S. and China. In these high-stakes exams, most of the questions are multiple-choice questions, and even in reading comprehension or writing, there seems to be a way of answering by which you are supposed to achieve excellence. In this context, would discussion-based instruction, which focuses on discussion and debate on open-ended topics, still help students prepare for these high-stakes exams?
Snow: In my opinion, having access to opportunities for argumentation and discussion in the classroom is not justified by the fact that it is what is going to be on the test because it obviously is not. It is justified if it promotes learning in the classroom. If it keeps students more active and engaged and gives them a better reason to read the texts because they know what information they are trying to discover, it makes them better readers, thinkers, and writers (for more information regarding how a curriculum featuring argumentation and discussion facilitates adolescents’ academic word learning, a foundational skill for reading, thinking, and writing, see Lawrence et al., 2015). These skills will be generalizable, perhaps to understand what is required on the test, even if what is required is not argumentation. Thus, that is the argument—argumentation offers highly motivating and authentic contexts for learning and knowing how to learn. That is its value in any education system whatsoever.
Pedagogy and assessment of discussion-based instruction
Deng: You just mentioned the motivational effects of discussion-based instruction on students. We know that some students are more talkative or outgoing than others, and they may be more likely to become comfortable with discussion and debate. You also mentioned that there are significant differences and diversity in terms of cultural, linguistic, and educational background in U.S. classrooms. Based on your experience, how do teachers meet the needs of students with different personalities and backgrounds in discussion-based instruction?
Snow: Yes, diversity among students is a topic worth further discussion. There will be diversity in the levels of preparation, motivation for learning, and personality characteristics, such as introversion or extroversion. I do not think that teachers must provide individualized instruction to address all this diversity. In fact, they need not even conduct the assessment except when they notice that a student is falling considerably far behind or is not connecting to the class. Nevertheless, I would emphasize preparing teachers to become familiar with the practices or mechanisms of classroom engagement to ensure the participation of students across all these different traits and subgroups.
For example, I gave a lecture for 10 min. Now, I am going to ask everybody to jot down an answer to the following question, but first, turn and talk with the person next to you. This is a very simple mechanism many teachers would automatically come up with, but some teachers must be told that it is a good thing to do. Another class participation mechanism is putting students in groups of four and assigning them roles: notetaker, accountant keeping track of what work is accomplished, researcher finding the relevant quotes in the article, and summarizer. Subsequently, we must ensure that these roles are rotated so that different students have specific responsibilities they can meet at their level. In American classrooms, this can be carried out in language-homogeneous classrooms, where everyone speaks English easily, but it can also be conducted in language-heterogeneous classrooms, where there are many nonnative English speakers. If you put all the Spanish and Chinese speakers, respectively, in two separate groups, they can do this work in the language they speak better before bringing it to the class in English. Therefore, I think there are many ways to deal with heterogeneity and diversity that do not require assessment or analysis of who the students are. This requires preparing teachers and mastering practice-based mechanisms to ensure that they can perform well.
Deng: Having a practice-based mechanism is indeed key to effective instruction. Our last formal question is also related to the implementation of discussion-based instruction. In traditional lecture-oriented classrooms, we know there is a corresponding classroom observation and assessment system. For discussion-based classrooms, how would we determine whether debates are going well and whether the instruction is effective?
Snow: I think you put your finger on one of the challenges of introducing and promoting discussion and classroom talk. As you mentioned, when teachers teach reading, for example, they can give comprehension tests, and they know whether the instruction has worked. When they teach biology, they can give tests to examine whether information about photosynthesis or the Krebs cycle has been learned and can be reproduced by students. However, if you hold a discussion or debate, it is much harder to judge whether each student has done a good job of participating or whether it is a good discussion compared to judging whether they have grasped knowledge. Nevertheless, I think there are several methods. For example, you can judge the discussion on the dimension of interactivity. Did everybody get a chance to talk? Did students share the floor more or less equally? You can also judge it based on responsivity. Did students actually listen to each other? Was there ever a case where one student said, “I’d like to say that I partly agree with what Sophia proposed, but I also partly disagree because …”? If the students made such comments, you can determine that they were listening to Sophia.
You can also judge whether the discussion is proceeding well based on whether students are raising several new ideas, but this is harder. Is there some actual learning or progress in the complexity of thinking that can be observed? I think that is extremely hard to do online while you are conducting a discussion. I think it is useful for teachers to record their classroom discussions and think about them afterward, such as what went well and what did not. However, the assessment issue holds many people back from engaging in classroom discussion as a general practice because it is extremely hard to know if you have performed well, which is difficult to do consistently.
Nevertheless, observations of classroom discussions indicate that these concerns almost never play out. Even doing it poorly for 10 min is actually a significant improvement over the normal situation where it is 0 min, and students hardly ever get a chance to talk about their ideas and interests. They can talk to answer questions as the teacher poses them, but they typically cannot bring up questions, nor can they guide the discussion at all. However, this should be something that students have the right to do for at least part of the time during class. Although they need not do it for 60 min, they can do it for 5 or 10 min in every class, during which they can be themselves, express their voices, and build agency.
I think that building student agency is an ideal that many teachers in the U.S. would embrace but still have difficulty implementing, find awkward, or meet resistance against implementing regularly. However, in certain educational systems, it is the norm that students should have a voice. For example, in French middle- and high-school classrooms, there is considerable room for discussion. It is what they think they should be doing. Thus, we have a sort of continuum across different countries of the degree to which discussion-based instruction is valued and promoted as an educational practice.
Concluding remarks: A new role for teachers
Deng: From what I understand, we should not be framing lecture- and discussion-based instruction as opposites of each other. You have mentioned that discussion-based instruction does not replace traditional classroom norms. Rather, it can act as a small but effective addition to catalyze learning in classrooms. Blending this instruction into the existing curriculum structure may help increase student motivation and support active learning by bringing refreshing changes to the classroom. This type of discussion and debate in the classroom is also flexible in terms of accommodating different educational systems in different countries worldwide.
Thank you for taking part in this interview. We have truly learned a lot. Do you have any final thoughts that you would like to share with Chinese students, teachers, parents, researchers, and policymakers at the conference?
Snow: For the last 10 years, I have watched teachers succeed and struggle in integrating discussion into their classes. From these observations, I have learned that the main issue is dealing with the traditional roles of the teacher. Traditionally, teachers have been the ones expected to possess knowledge and answers. However, to launch an honest discussion, teachers are required to change their role to become fellow knowledge seekers alongside students. It is a tough transition for teachers who never want to say, “I don’t know,” “I’m not sure,” or “Let me think about that.” It is also difficult for students accustomed to looking at the teacher for signals regarding the right answer.
Therefore, these discussions are difficult to launch for topics with a definitive right answer. A dilemma with no good answer would be a topic much easier to launch and manage. Disputable topics are a good way to start because teachers and students can practice how these discussions are facilitated in the classroom. The next steps can lead to more authentic discussions in which the teacher knows more but is willing to let the students move through the process of exploring, establishing, and building their arguments.
Takeaway message
This article consists of an interview with Professor Catherine Snow, an expert on English language and literacy education. The interview aims to introduce discussion-based instruction to educational practitioners.
Discussion-based instruction inspires students to take initiatives and increases their engagement in the classroom. It is recommended that a dilemma without a singular answer should be set as the discussion topic.
Discussion-based instruction can be combined with traditional lecture-based instruction. It helps students become better readers, thinkers, and writers, facilitating their achievements in standardized assessments.
The article highlights that teachers can switch their roles from being owners and conveyors of knowledge to becoming fellow knowledge seekers with their students.
