Allegheny College Joshua Searle-White, Ph.D.

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Leading a discussion is an important but challenging activity.  If I ask you to lead a discussion, either with a co-leader or by yourself, you may well feel at the mercy of your colleagues in the class.  After all, if they won’t talk, you won’t look so good!

However, you are not entirely at their mercy.  There are some things you can do to increase the chances that you will be successful in leading a discussion.  Here are some suggestions:

Before the class meeting in which you will lead the discussion, you should plan a strategy for the class session.  To begin, you should:

   · Think about and the interesting ideas and/or difficulties you ran into while doing your reading.  Be honest about what you found interesting, unusual, offensive, or whatever.

   · If the author of the article is someone you have never heard of, it would make sense for you to do a little investigation to find out who she or he is and where she or he is coming from.  Don’t spend too much time -- sometimes even simply knowing where a person went to graduate school or what books or articles he or she has written can help a lot for your understanding, and it also makes you look well-prepared and intelligent in front of your colleagues.

   · Decide what you think are the most important points that should be understood from the article, and write these down.  Then write down any questions that you are unsure about, things that you did not understand (because if you didn’t, the chances are that a bunch of people in the class didn’t either).

When you get to class, your task is be to initiate and manage the discussion (that is, not to spend a lot of the class talking yourself).  Here are some tips:

   · Remember -- the point of this is to get a discussion going, not a question-and-answer session, where you ask a question and the class members respond.   However, it is usually useful to begin by asking a question.  If you begin by saying “So, what did you think?”, you are likely (though not necessarily) to get an embarrassed silence in return.  You might instead state something you thought about the article and ask “Do you agree?”  In general, start with more specific questions and work to more general ones.

   · It can sometimes be difficult to encourage the class members to talk.  You are not responsible for filling in empty spaces in the conversation.  Nonetheless, if you do get a silence in your attempts to begin the discussion, don’t worry.  You can do either of two things.  First, you can just sit and let the silence drag on.  You can bet that if you keep quiet, it will eventually get so uncomfortable that someone will start to talk.  If you’d rather not tolerate that much anxiety, you can just call on somebody in the group and ask him or her something specific -- there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.  If you do that, though, try not to ask a factual question (e.g., “So, what did that author say on page 5 about psychodynamic psychotherapy?”) and instead ask something less threatening, like “Do you think the author made a good case that neuroleptic drugs should be banned?”  Don’t press someone too hard, but don’t let them off too easily either -- after all, you are the leader.

   · As the discussion progresses, you have several tasks to keep in mind.  First, although you want to let the discussion develop naturally, you don’t want it to get too far off task, and if it does, you need to rein it in.  Second, make sure that no individual or individuals is/are dominating the conversation -- you can always say something like “Let’s see if we can hear from somebody who hasn’t talked yet” or something like that if necessary.  The general rule is that everybody must have spoken once before anyone can speak for a second time.  Third, you need at times to respond to what the group members are saying, either by summarizing what you think they said or by probing further and trying to get them to fill out their judgments (e.g., by asking things like “So what makes you say that?” or “If you think that the author is a total nincompoop, then do you think everything she says in the article makes no sense?).  Asking questions of clarification of people who have spoken, if you are truly interested in exploring that person’s ideas, is a good way to get discussion going.  And fourth, keep an eye out to make sure that you do not spend the whole time on one small piece of the article; there may be times when you decide that you have to move on, or else you will not get to points that you consider very important.

Overall, leading a discussion involves a constant tension between letting go enough to let the discussion take on its own life, and keeping enough control so that it does not get out of hand.  Obviously, I will be there and participating in the discussion at all times, so I will give you some help -- though I won’t completely let you off the hook.  Leading a discussion is complicated, but this exercise should give you some of the experience you need to get good at it.