Leading discussions requires us to maintain a balance between using our voices and encouraging students to use theirs. Some ideas for sparking discussions include:

A suggestion for increasing the number of student responses you get in discussion comes from John Woodcock from the University of Indiana at Bloomington. He suggests breaking up your presentation by giving students two or three minutes to discuss a question with the person sitting next to him or her. Rather than having students report on their own ideas, ask them to report on their discussion partner’s good ideas. Woodcock states that when he tried this, “Three times as many hands went up, and the reports had a consistently better energy.” This technique can work with any size group, in almost any teaching situation.

One strategy that several KU faculty members have found useful is called the fishbowl, a discussion format in which part of the class forms a discussion circle and remaining students form a listening circle around the discussion group. Click here for a description of how to implement a fishbowl discussion.