Last year in my classroom I went back to using online forums as a way to prime my students’ about a given topic that we would be talking about in class. Forums can be a great tool to get students thinking about a class discussion topic and to have students start a conversation online before having the real discussion in class. This leads to better and deeper conversations between the students and the teacher takes on a moderator role rather than a questioner of the class.
The Process
I begin preparing for the discussion by having my students research topics related to the upcoming class discussion. I then post the discussion topics as forum posts to my class website at the end of the school day with the expectation that students are going to post an answer as homework. I remind students that they should be keeping a copy of the post they are responding to and their answer in their design notebooks. Within the next day or two we then have the class discussion, I post the topics that we will be discussing on the board in the front of the room to act as an agenda for the class. This helps the class to drive their own discussion and determine when to move on to a new topic. Additionally, I will assign one student to be a topic moderate based on the responses received in the forum discussion. Before we end the discussion I give everyone the chance for a final thought and this done in a simple round-robin format.
Assessment
Assessing this type of discussion and opinion based assignment can be tough, for that reason I try to keep it simple. I require that students respond two at least two of the typically three topics with at least a two to three sentence answer in the online forum, they can earn extra points by responding to less popular topics as well. I think require every student to respond in each of the three topics in the classroom discussion as well. This method keeps the assignments fairly simple and straightforward to grade, but pushes students to respond with answers more than just “I agree” or “Same as what … said”.
This method works because it holds students accountable to respond, but it also teaches them to value other’s opinions. It about the process of teaching students to have open discussions and building the ability to debate.