An eleventh-grade English class is discussing Hamlet, and the teacher has been trying to direct students' attention to Hamlet's changing character, displayed dramatically in the scene between Hamlet and his mother when he skewers the eavesdropping Polonius. At that point, a student raises a question that changes the subsequent course of the discussion and opens up a lively exchange about the female characters' perspectives in the play:
SILCA: Did the queen have a choice when she remarried?
TEACHER: See, we don't really know that. Do you mean like the government, would they plan it, is that what you mean?
SILCA: No, I mean like, did she have a say in her second marriage? 'Cause, I mean, Hamlet's like blaming his mom.
Whether Gertrude, the queen, was an accomplice in her first husband's murder, a conniving instigator in the tragedy, or whether she was an innocent victim, buffeted by events not of her making, became then a subject of considerable interest in the discussion, sparking many different perspectives and possibilities. However, though many students were excitedly vocal in their responses to the question, a number of other students spoke not a word. What were those quiet students thinking and feeling?
I had the opportunity to interview some of those students during a case study of one teacher's classroom literature discussions (Townsend 1991). Even though many studies of classroom discourse have documented the persistent dearth of genuine discussion in our schools (Alvermann et al. 1990; Cazden 1988; Marshall et al. 1995), 1 looked for an English classroom where real, broadly interactive discussion was a staple of classroom life. The challenge was to find a classroom where both the teacher and the students asked questions that were open to personal interpretation, where wonderings could be expressed without ridicule or disparagement, where the discussion format provided a welcome forum for differing views. I wasn't attempting to describe prevailing practice or common interaction patterns; I was looking for an exemplary classroom where real discussion flourished.
In the course of that study, and because several of the students I interviewed spoke little during the discussions I was analyzing -and yet were quite verbal during our oneto-one conversations-I became intrigued by their silent perspectives. Unless purposeful measures are taken to solicit and help develop everyone's views (measures such as writing before and after a discussion as well as preparatory small-group and paired talk) teachers often don't hear much from the quiet students in their classrooms. In classroom discussions particularly, teachers tend to focus on talkative members of class and may assume that quiet students aren't as prepared, aren't as interested, or possibly even aren't as sharp as their outspoken peers. Often, teachers simply don't have the time or energy to worry about students who don't talk when other students are asking for immediate responses to their ideas and questions.
Do quiet students run the risk of being missed? Even worse, when we extol the value of talk in our English classrooms, do we sometimes neglect to help all students feel comfortable and confident speaking to a large group? Do we sometimes then also inadvertently offend or belittle students whose classroom participation runs silently?
INTERVIEWS WITH STUDENTS
For the interviews, the teacher of the class generously arranged a room in her home near the school where she connected the English department's VCR to her television. It was a private and informal place; the participants sat on the couch or rug next to the VCR for easy access to the pause button should they wish to remark on a particular event in the discussion, and I sat on the rug in front of the VCR so I could press the pause button when I saw something I wanted to ask about. The night before the interviews, I developed a kind of mental geography of the discussion by reviewing a videotape of each discussion and making notes so that I could find points of particular interest to view. I selected episodes for the students and teacher to watch, and sometimes, during the interview someone asked to see another particular exchange.
Questions that I asked during the interviews included some version of the following:
* What strikes you most in thinking about the previous day's discussion?
* What were you thinking at the time (of a particular episode from the discussion)?
* What do you think the point was (of a particular interchange or comment)?
* How engaged were you?
* Did any new ideas or questions come to your mind?
* Did you think about, talk about, read about, or write about anything from the discussion afterwards?
* Were there any comments you didn't make but wished you had?
* What purpose did the discussion serve for you?
Also, I continually asked for clarification of responses. Although I had a prepared list of questions to ask, I took my cues from the participants as to both the order and substance of my queries (Goetz and Lecompte 1984). I was also open about my own ignorance and uncertainty on various matters, a stance that probably encouraged an openness and candor among the students. In any case, they all appeared to be comfortable, and in general, the interviews were great fun for me. The students brought unique, personal perspectives to our conversations (and chose their own pseudonyms).
THE STUDENTS
Although I had intended to interview two normally chatty and two usually quiet students (identified as such by the teacher), as it turned out, three of the four-Rex, Anne, and Angela-were generally silent during the three discussions I studied.
Rex, an athletic young man with short brown hair and a perpetual baseball cap on his head, told me he wished I had chosen to study discussions about different books. He had a hard time understanding the language of Shakespeare in Hamlet, and he was bored with the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (a modern play, thematically tied to Hamlet) was easier to understand, and indeed, Rex talked more in that discussion than he had in the previous two about Hamlet. Even so, his participation, according to both Rex himself and his teacher, was unusually subdued. Nevertheless, during his interviews, he provided a good deal of vivid information about his unspoken thoughts and feelings during the discussions, and perhaps he represents many students who feel alienated from their textual materials.
Another student also somewhat confounded the teachers assessment of her participation style. Anne, a thoughtful young woman with long, wavy dark hair, had been labeled "quiet" by the teacher, and in truth, during our interviews she was diffident and soft-spoken. Nevertheless, in the second discussion of Hamlet that I studied, Anne surprised the teacher and herself by speaking up at several points. The teacher thought that perhaps she had gained confidence from the lively conversation she and I had had during her first interview. Indeed, in all of the interviews, her insights about the discussion dynamics revealed an active level of mental participation with the issues raised even though she maintained a generally quiet stance in class.
No question about the characterization of the third quiet student I interviewed; Angela, a good-humored, rosy-cheeked blonde, never uttered a word out loud to the groupat-large during the four months I was in the classroom. Angela had little patience with the complicated literary issues raised in the discussions, but she was an assiduous note-taker and made the highest grade on the end-ofstudy exam, the "quotes test," a test of the context and significance of important quotations from Hamlet. Nevertheless, she was irritated with the uncertainty of literary interpretation, and, in her interviews, Angela was forthright in her appraisal of both the value and limitations of classroom discussion.
To begin to understand what happens to quiet students during classroom discussion, the perspectives of these three students merit consideration. While the reasons that particular students are quiet are no doubt various and multiple, these students represent a range of classroom personalities. A close examination of the details of their experience is startling in that we can see each student make sense of the same classroom events in remarkably different ways.
REX: WILLING BUT CONFUSED
Rex was silent during discussions of Hamlet, but, according to his teacher and himself, he wasn't normally quiet in class. He didn't enjoy reading Hamlet, often becoming confused and frustrated with Shakespearean language, resorting to Cliffs Notes for a basic understanding of plot and characters, and laughing with his best friend after class about how "stupid" the play was.
When I asked him why he wasn't talking in class, he told me, "I don't understand what's going on, so I can't say anything." He liked to participate in discussions and elaborated on his plight in our first interview:
I talk more in the books that I understand. But, I think everybody does. I mean there's a lot, there's only a few people talking there, but I mean, when we really get into the books that, you know, like, I understand, I guess more people in class understand them better too. But, it gets a lot better. It would probably have been better if you'd done a different book.
Rex had great difficulty with Shakespeare's language and at the beginning was lost in a mire of confusion about Hamlet. When I asked him what he remembered from the first discussion, he told me he couldn't remember anything. Although all of the participants I interviewed had some trouble remembering much about the previous day's discussion when I first asked about it, after looking at a bit of video, memory usually flooded back. What Rex remembered with great clarity, however, rarely had much to do with the substance of the discussions. His memory usually involved peripheral matters such as interchanges with friends and events from his past.
Rex participated more in the next class discussion of Hamlet that we talked about, and he told me that with the help of the Cliffs Notes, he understood it "a little bit better." Indeed, by the end of his work on Hamlet, Rex did quite well, making a B on the "quotes test." However, he also told me he was bored with the class. When I asked him why, he explained:
'Cause it's such a boring play, I mean. . . 'Cause there's no action. I mean there's action, but it doesn't seem like [it] comes very often. Whenever the action parts come up that we talk about, I kind of get into it, but then, I kind of go in and out of the class, you know? . . . When an action part comes, then I'm listening, but.... Like when he's talking to his mom, and he goes and shoves the knife in the curtain and kills Polonius and that.
That Rex felt enlivened at that point in the discussion and labeled it an action part is interesting. It's at that point in the discussion when the teacher draws attention to Hamlet's changing character in the bedroom scene with his mother, where indeed Hamlet does impale the eavesdropping Polonius, that female students in the class began questioning Gertrude's motivation in the play Silca's question about whether the queen had a choice in marrying the murderous Claudius succeeded in influencing the subsequent course of the entire discussion.
Of that issue, Rex had no memory. What he did remember, aside from the momentarily interesting "action part," was that, "somebody says something about women's lib or something like that." When I asked him what he had been thinking, he provided the following description:
It just made me think of how the girls, like in high school, they're always wanting this and that, but then, and they get it most of the time, you know, they get their women's lib, whatever they want, but then it's still the guys who have to-'cause like the day before in track, they had made all the guys go move the mats and everything, and the girls just sat there, and it just made me [mad].
Rex had clearly drifted away from the topics under discussion in the classroomboth from the issue of Gertrude's plight raised by females in the class and from the teacher's question about the changing nature of Hamlet's character. What drew his attention was a personal experience that he associated with other students' interest in Gertrude's role, an experience that indeed did have a personal connection-issues of gender are universal-to questions about the female characters' plight in the play Rex was attending to the discussion but in his own way.
When I asked Rex in one of our interviews why he hadn't asked a question out loud that instead he had whispered to a good friend, he told me he simply hadn't wanted the teacher to think that "I didn't do my homework or something." I asked Rex about the frequent one-to-one exchanges he had with his friend during the discussions, and he explained that often the two of them were trying to figure out things between themselves. I observed many students in the class exchanging occasional asides with each other, and other students told me the same thing-these private interchanges between students were often about the very issues being discussed by the group at large.
Another reason Rex suggested for not venturing an uncertain comment or question out loud was that he might be interrupting the teacher. Indeed, finding what H. Mehan (1979) called the "seams" in classroom discourse where one can appropriately interject a remark, especially in discourse that is as unpatterned and unpredictable as real discussion, surely challenges all participants and is one reason students may be quiet.
Rex saw a value in the classroom discussions; he felt they helped him write an assigned paper that required some original thinking. He told me he used the issues other students raised in discussion when he was planning the paper. He said, eyes twinkling, "I can, you know, tie the ideas, the good ideas from class, put a little b.s. with it and add on the theme, and it works." Rex liked the camaraderie made possible in whole group discussion, but he was frustrated in the discussions of Hamlet. In one of the interviews, the teacher told me she had noticed "his eyes," eyes of confusion and eyes quite different than the ones he shared with me.
ANNE: SOFTSPOKEN AND SHY
In the first discussion of Hamlet, Anne did not make an out-loud comment. However, over the course of my research, and particularly in the next discussion I studied, she spoke up several times, making interesting points. In our interview sessions, Anne and I explored at some depth many of the topics that came up in class, and these interchanges probably influenced her classroom participation. Although she was hesitant to express her ideas in class discussion, she demonstrated a keen and curious mind in our conversational talk about literary issues.
For Anne, the first discussion we talked about was a fairly straightforward introduction to the characters in Hamlet. She was interested in following up issues raised during her reading. When I asked her what purpose the discussion had served for her, she replied, "Well listening, yeah, listening to other people helps me under-, you know, connect things in my mind." I asked her to elaborate, and she made the following remark:
Well, when I, you know, when other people bring up points, they're, just anything, just generally talking about it in class, reminds me of things, and then I can start 'cause I've already read it through once, and this is like the second time going back over it, so you can-it's a lot easier to-connect things even if you're just generally discussing it.
This first class discussion of Hamlet served as a review of Anne's reading and also as a source of new ideas for her continued reading. She followed the discussion of literary issues and questions with interest and looked forward to continuing those explorations.
When I asked her about making comments to the class at large, she responded, "I just don't like to; I don't usually bring anything up." She also told me that when she did have a comment to make, often someone else brought it up before she could. She seemed content to remain an observer and gave a great deal of thought and attention to the comments others were making.
When I asked her what she found particularly intriguing in that first discussion, she replied:
When [the teacher] got down to talking about just general characteristics about Hamlet and stuff, or whoever she was talking about. I guess that was, you know, I like getting down to these kind of things, questions like that, and then, ha, I kind of wait for other people to start, you know, bringing up evidence for it.
She relied, in some measure, on other students to supply the reasoning that builds a case for personal views on an issue. Her own interpretations, however, were also given close textual attention as she read her assignments. Her energetic wonderings about the motivation of various characters was the type of wondering-wonderings about human plights-that constituted the nature of most participants' expressed wonderings in these discussions. The voiced reasoning of others apparently helped direct and elaborate her thinking about the issues of character and plight that she so relished pondering (see Townsend 1991 for further discussion of wondering discourse).
Anne was a reserved person who said that she liked to write "rather than talk." Although she did not express any wonderings during the class discussions, she shared a number with me during our interviews. When I asked her if she followed up on the issues raised during a class discussion, she told me she often returned to notes she had compiled during class and during her reading to reconsider a question. Apparently, writing on her own allowed her a more comfortable way than talking to express her ideas and remember her thoughts. Yet she said she often referred back to questions raised in the discussions. Though a quiet student, Anne actively speculated about literary issues; she was opening her mind and entertaining multiple possibilities and perspectives.
When I mentioned during our second interview that she had contributed a number of points to the previous day's discussion, she remarked, "I couldn't believe I was so talkative." She enjoyed reading, and she enjoyed thinking about issues in literature. However, she was self-conscious and self-critical. At one point during an interview, she was reflecting on her ideas about one of the discussion topics and said, "I'm glad I didn't say anything 'cause it wouldn't have made any sense."
For Anne, the second discussion we talked about was more engaging than the first. She told me, "I was interested 'cause I was talking partly" When I asked what had made her talk, she told me that during her reading, she had been thinking back to ideas discussed previously When she turned to a point in the text that was under current discussion, and she had already written a comment next to it, then she could speak the thought out loud with some confidence. I asked her if she'd had any ideas that she hadn't had a chance to express, she said, "Well, actually I did. I think I had a, see, I didn't go look through where, you know, at what I had written unless we were looking at it in class, but there were some things I had written, and I didn't, um, bring up." I asked why, and she replied, "It didn't come up in class I don't think, um, [looking through her book] like I had a question on this, something the queen had said. I guess I didn't even understand what was going on." She added, "It's probably just wording, though."
Anne was giving the language of the text, the meaning of particular passages close attention, perhaps partly in preparation for the "quotes test." In any case, that she had previously written down her ideas, undergoing in essence a kind of rehearsal, gave her both the confidence and the verbal forms to express her thinking when she saw an opportunity However, she felt constrained to wait until someone else had initiated the topic.
She became intrigued by the discussion about the women's point of view in the play and noted particularly the question about Gertrude's complicity in the murder of her former husband. She told me the teacher had called attention to the point, and she was waiting to see what she thought when she continued her reading. Another example of Anne's careful interest in the discussions about Hamlet came at a point when the teacher was trying to draw attention to the moral dilemma that faced Hamlet as a seeker of revenge within the context of a Christianity that eschewed vengeance. The teacher proceeded to expand on this notion with a 13-line discourse on blood feuds, trying to remind students of the previous year's reading of Beowulf.
After a brief pause and no response, the teacher initiated a new topic, the character of Polonius. In my interview with the teacher, she lamented the students' apparent lack of attention to Hamlet's "tight spot." However, Anne told me in our interview that she had been considering that very point. What sparked Anne's interest in part was why the teacher had put the play in a Christian context. She asked me, "Are we putting it in a Christian context just because, um, for Hamlet's sake?" Perhaps, too, many teachers get discouraged because of a mistaken belief that if students aren't speaking, they're not interested and not paying attention. Students who are quiet during class discussions may be doing important mental work.
Anne was a quiet student who nonetheless maintained a high level of mental involvement with the issues under discussion by other class members. She enjoyed the exchange of ideas and continued to think, read, and write about them. Yet she often hesitated to venture forth with her own ideas. Even in her writing, she slowly and carefully considered the complexity of literary issues. For example, she needed extra time to complete the "quotes test." Anne was especially vulnerable to the ephemeral nature of discussion. Having time to compose her thoughts seemed essential for her to make out-loud contributions.
ANGELA: IRRITATED AND IMPATIENT
Angela was also one of the quiet students in class; during all my observations, she never made a comment out loud except to her best friend, Catherine, in occasional asides. She told me that she never talked much in her English class, and when I asked her if her participation differed from class to class, she replied:
Kind of, yeah. But in some classes, I really don't talk much, just, I've decided it's because, first, I've always been shy and second, I think it's like public school background 'cause you're not supposed to, you know? . . I think it's just from my background and just personality kind of. 'Cause it's, and I don't feel, well, I do now, but I didn't used to totally feel comfortable in that class, just because I wasn't used to it. And so, until I'm comfortable in there, I'm not going to just burst out.
Although she did not speak out to the class at large, in our interviews she revealed a good deal of thoughtful attention to, and good humor about, the issues under discussion. In class, she took notes conscientiously and made the highest grade in the class on the "quotes test." Despite her apparent virtuosity with literary matters, Angela admitted that one reason she was averse to making comments in class was because she thought the teacher would ask her to elaborate:
Well, another thing in English is I hate it when you say something, and you haven't really thought it too far down, you know, and then she'll like say, "Well what about . . . ?" Ah, I don't know, you know? [laughs] Forget it.
When I asked Angela if that made her feel as if she'd rather not venture, she agreed and said whatever point she might raise usually got covered anyway. She added, "I mean, sometimes I do speak up a bit, but, and Catherine and I talk, too, a little." Nevertheless, Angela was constrained by the stress of worrying that she might be called on to explain ideas that were vague and tentative.
Does that kind of worry prevent other students from exploring new ideas out loud? Were this teacher's attempts to encourage students to elaborate on their ideas yet another unintentional version of the "gentle inquisition" (Eeds and Wells 1989)? Apparently, teachers' abundant use of questions in the classroom can dampen students' desires to speak out about ideas they are just beginning to formulate (Cazden 1988; Dillon 1994).
Angela expressed impatience with her English class and the "indecisiveness" of literature study. Perhaps all real discussionbecause it must invite differing perspectives -requires an openness to possibilities that rejects definitive resolution. In any case, Angela was frequently displeased with the vagaries of the class discussions. The following is from our first interview:
You know, I just don't like getting really deep into things.... that kind of indecision, I think, and I mean, sometimes I like it, but not, I think part of it's, not in the afternoon, you know, with history left to go, and it's just. ... I think I like to do it more on my own, too. Like when I'm reading it at night in my room, you know, sitting there and, you don't have anything else to do and you have plenty of time and you just sit there and think, hey, maybe this meant, you know, but I don't like to just sit in the classroom and have it discussed.
Like many high school students, Angela had a schedule that was busy and pressurebound. Angela told me, "It's nice to have things, like, decisive because you have so much homework, that, you know, you don't have time to think about this, you have to do whatever else." Here again, in a different way, we can see the pressure of time constraining a student's participation in classroom discussion.
Angela used the class discussion as a way to organize her own thoughts from her reading and prepare for the upcoming test: "That's why I take a lot of notes because then when you go back and look over it, it helps a whole lot to see what, you know, little things, what hidden meanings and stuff that happened." Though she was attentive to the discussions, she expressed little enthusiasm for the undertaking.
Angela did say she became interested in the question of the queen's motive when the teacher began to wonder about Gertrude's innocence, but she told me her response to the student who first raised the issue was tempered by skepticism she felt for anything that student said. She told me bluntly that Silca's question was "stupid." One reason for this harsh response had to do with Angela's preconceived, generally low opinion of that particular student's comments. What's interesting is that Angela did become engaged when the teacher-later in the discussionexpressed a similar wondering about the queen. Other students in my study mentioned personal dislike for classmates as a reason for inattention or disdain toward their remarks. The interaction of individual personalities and preconceived attitudes toward fellow students apparently has a powerful influence on attention and interest. Fear of peers' judgment may be another reason why some students shrink from speaking out.
Angela was a conscientious student who expressed conflicting feelings about openended, uncertain, searching activity in discussion. She was irritated with what she saw as the pointless meanderings in much of the class discussions, and she would have preferred to reach definite conclusions so she could more easily move on to her next assignment. Nevertheless, Angela was paying careful attention to the discussions, and her participation, though unspoken, was active.
WHAT CAN TEACHERS DO?
Consider That Students Are Silent for Wide-Ranging Reasons
Why certain students don't speak out in classroom discussions is complicated. Rex was quiet because of confusion about the course material even after serious personal effort to make sense of it, or, perhaps at times, because of insufficient preparation for class. Anne was generally quiet because of a shy personality, though she did speak out when circumstances were encouraging. Angela was silent because of a shy personality as well as her irritation and impatience with the inconclusive nature of personal interpretation. As different as each student was, so too were their reasons different for not talking out loud in the discussions. Certainly, other students have other reasons, ranging from personality and mood to cultural conflicts and gender role expectations and prejudices.
Talkativeness is apparently not a fixed characteristic. When asked, the teacher of these students had no difficulty identifying "quiet" and "chatty" members of her class, and indeed Angela was labeled "quiet" and never made an out-loud comment during my observations. But, in contrast, Rex was labeled "chatty" and yet wasn't at all talkative in discussions of Hamlet, and Anne was listed as "quiet," but spoke out on several occasions.
Why students choose to speak out on some occasions and remain quiet on others is complicated. Many factors influenced the participation styles of the students I interviewed. How much, and what kind of, preparation they'd done for the discussion, what opportunities arose for interjecting a topic of particular, personal interest, or for responding to topics of related interest, certainly affected these students' choices about when, how, and indeed whether, to speak up.
These students had preconceived attitudes about their classmates that also influenced how much attention they gave to particular issues raised in the discussion. More than once, informants told me of comments they ignored from students they didn't respect. That kind of peer judgment may keep shy or uncertain students from speaking out. The students generally viewed the teacher's comments favorably, but Angela mentioned feeling constrained by the possibility that the teacher would ask her to elaborate on her ideas. The common practice of teachers' directing and sustaining discussion through long series of questions actually inhibits some students from speaking up.
Consider That Students Who Are Quiet May Be Learning
What these three "quiet" students told me in a series of interviews raises questions about assuming that students who are quiet during discussions are inattentive, unprepared, uninterested, or uncooperative. Rex was confused about the course material and didn't want the teacher to think he hadn't done his homework. Although he was struggling to understand Hamlet, he simply didn't know enough about what was going on to form a question. In contrast, Anne was intently engaged in the issues raised during the discussions, but she was shy and diffident of her opinions. She also needed more time to formulate her thoughts than the discussions generally allowed.
Angela was a very different case than either of the other two. She didn't lack confidence in her opinions, although she did describe herself as shy. Instead, she kept a purposeful distance from the course material, carefully taking notes but not becoming emotionally or intellectually engaged in the topics of discussion.
Many students feel pressed for time in school. Angela remarked on the frustration she felt with the uncertainty of discussion when she had so many other assignments to do. Anne needed enough time to compose her thoughts, time that often was missing from the immediate give-and-take of the classroom interaction. Rex was struggling to keep up with the pace of talk about literary issues before he had mastered the basics of plot and character.
In most classrooms, students get high grades if they work and think fast. Possibly, many students are quiet during discussions because discussion itself is so time-consuming. According to James Marshall et al.'s study of classroom discussion (1995), both teachers and students feel intense pressure to "cover" specific curricular material. There may be little additional time available for idiosyncratic thinking, even though new ideas often come from diverse perspectives and the multiple possibilities engendered by wondering.
Consider Multiple Means to Collect and Spur Students' Thinking
In discussions, teachers have an opportunity to encourage the kinds of thinking they wish to nurture in students, and apparently, quiet students can gain from their mental, unspoken participation in class. Students who do not feel comfortable, for whatever reason, in speaking out to the group at large need other opportunities to express their reactions, their musings, their puzzlement.
What I found from talking with these students raises questions about the wisdom of teachers' awarding points or arranging other kinds of reward for out-loud comments during class discussion, suggesting thereby that spoken contributions alone are valued. Creative and critical thinking can be demonstrated during classroom discussions, and all of the students I talked to remarked on the benefit of the discussions in their studies. They told me that listening to both their teacher and their peers helped prepare them for the tests they had to take as well as for the papers they were assigned to write. Listening to another student's comment or question might raise a new idea or alleviate like-minded confusion. The class discussions often seemed to plant seeds of thought for later, private cultivation. And, presumably, because one often elaborates ideas in response to listening ears, talkative students can benefit from quiet students' attention.
HELPING STUDENTS SPEAK OUT
The range of reasons that students are quiet during discussion are sure to be as varied as each student who finds it hard to express ideas out loud in a large-group setting. We must find ways of helping all students feel confident and comfortable speaking out.
How might we help all students be ready and willing to explain their ideas? What are some ways to encourage students to deepen their thinking? What might lessen the inevitable stress and press of classroom time constraints? A few ideas that may help:
* Encourage students to generate questions they care about and ask them to bring to class, in writing, their own topics for discussion.
* Allow five to ten minutes at the beginning of class for students to collect their thoughts or skim the assignment.
* Before discussion, have students write down their reactions to their reading and, after the discussion, ask them to assess the influence of the class talk on their thinking. * Organize small group or paired talk to generate discussion questions-openended questions that invite multiple perspectives about a reading.
* Occasionally, plan five to ten minutes to write individual responses to each other's questions.
* Allow time and demand that everyone explain their responses with reference to the text under discussion. * Give students a chance to rehearse their thinking by talking with a congenial partner.
* Know that discussion does take time and talk explicitly about the problem with students so no one unconsciously and unnecessarily forces closure. * Allow "run-overs" by continuing the discussion of an issue from one class to the next.
* Plan a series of opportunities for students to write about their developing thinking. Teachers who believe in the value of discussion must find ways to encourage all students to reflect on issues and deliberatively explore multiple perspectives. Even when their voices are silent, discussion gives all students-quiet and talkative alikeopportunities to form their thinking and stretch their understanding.
Reference:
Works Cited
Reference:
Alvermann, D. E., D. G. O'Brien, and D. R. Dillon. 1990. "What Teachers Do When They Say They're Having Discussions Following Content Reading Assignments: A Qualitative Analysis." Reading Research Quarterly 25.4: 296-322.
Cazden, C. B. 1988. Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Reference:
Dillon, J. T.1994. Using Discussion in Classrooms. Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Eeds, M. and D. Wells. 1989. "Grand Conversations: An Exploration of Meaning Construction in Literature Study Groups." Research in the Teaching of English 23: 4-29.
Goetz, J. P and M. D. LeCompte. 1984. Ethnography and Qualitative Design in Educational Research. Austin, TX: Academic Press, Inc.
Reference:
Marshall, J. D., P Smagorinsky, and M. W Smith. 1995. The Language of Interpretation: Patterns of Discourse in Discussions of Literature. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Mehan, H. 1979. Learning Lessons: Social Organization in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Townsend, J. S. 1991. A Study of Wondering Discourse in Three Literature Class Discussions. Dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin.
Author Affiliation:
Jane S. Townsend teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.