Please Don’t Grade Discussions

Early in my teaching career, one of the most controversial choices I made was to not grade discussions–even against the advice of teachers and administrators who I respect. As a new teacher, my defiance was rooted in my own experience as a high school student; I remembered my English classes where discussions were graded based on the number and quality of comments, which inevitably led to a vacuous conversation. On the other hand, many teachers fear that without some kind of incentive, many students will choose not to participate in a discussion. So: what is the point of discussion in classes? And is there a way to create a good class discussion even without grades?

Creating good discussions is one of the most important things a teacher can do: it teaches students the joy of playing with ideas; the power of working with others; and the empathy necessary to be a good citizen.

Discussions are hard, and good discussions are harder. Many adults are bad at discussion. So it’s no wonder why so many teachers worry about the usefulness of discussion or the problems that it creates: What if nobody talks? What if only a couple talk all the time?

But grading discussions assumes that being quiet in a discussion is a bad thing. As adults, we all know this to simply be wrong. How many times have you sat in a meeting that has droned on and on because people keep talking about nothing? Or how many times have you been in a conversation where the other person was just trying to show you how much they know? Or what about a “discussion” led by a manager that really had a predetermined outcome? All of these are annoying to us as adults. But unfortunately, they are also the kind of behaviors we incentivize as teachers when we grade discussions.

The purpose of discussion

In order to figure out how to structure a discussion, you first must answer the question: what is the purpose of a class discussion? Is it to assess learning? Is it to demonstrate knowledge? Or is it to generate new ideas through interacting with one another? My belief is that whole-class (and small group) discussions are great for generating new ideas and deepening current understanding, and that assigning a grade to discussions is antithetical to the meandering and lack of predictability that a good discussion has. Jesse Stommel writes,

Something like “have an epiphany, communicate an original thought, sit uncomfortably with your not knowing, or build something that’s never been built before” can’t be motivated by a grade.

The problem with grading discussions

There are myriad reasons to not grade discussions. Grading assignments tends to smother internal motivation. As my good friend Dr. Ron Butchart writes:

There is virtually no such thing as an unmotivated four year old; young children are voracious learners. Yet the schools are full of unmotivated ten and twelve-year-olds….[M]odern life has constructed children’s lives in such a way that self-motivation is suffocated.

Step into any lunchroom and you will know that students have plenty of motivation to talk! The structure of education in the US, however, has extinguished an interest in talking about academic topics–exciting ideas that might have gotten you excited about becoming an educator in the first place. And grading discussions, counterintuitively, probably makes discussion worse. As Alfie Kohn writes:

Studies have shown that too much attention to the quality of one’s performance is associated with more superficial thinking, less interest in whatever one is doing, less perseverance in the face of failure, and a tendency to attribute the outcome to innate ability and other factors thought to be beyond one’s control.

There are lots of reasons why a student might not be speaking during a discussion. Do they not have anything substantive to say? Do they not know what to say in a discussion or how to participate well? Are they thinking? Are they not paying attention? Are they anxious or shy? Are they afraid of how their peers or the teacher might respond? Are they generally afraid of failure? Each of these indicates a different intervention that a teacher might use, yet grading a discussion hits students with a blunt tool: a 0. A zero to convey they have done something wrong. A zero to indicate that they ought to be speaking.

How to create a good class discussion

Not grading a discussion doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t structure a discussion. On the contrary, if you remove the blunt tools of rewards and punishments from a discussion, you must then be much more deliberate in planning your discussion to overcome those barriers that prevent students from talking: substance, peer approval, techniques for responding, and interest (among others).

When teachers abandon grading discussions, they frequently turn to a practice that is just as nefarious: cold-calling students. Cold-calling robs a student of their consent to participate. As an adult, have you ever been cold called in a faculty meeting? Did you enjoy it? Did it make you want to talk more?

Cold-calling follows a trend in education for teachers to take too much responsibility in the classroom through over-structuring. And this trend makes sense: if an administrator measures the quality of a classroom based on how many times students participate, a teacher faces an immense amount of pressure to make sure students are speaking. But cold calling does not allow students to develop self-motivation to participate or to figure out when to participate. Moreover, it assumes that a discussion involves people calling on each other–whereas in the adult world, most discussions don’t involve calling on each other. They involve navigating the trickiness of waiting for a good time to speak and responding to each other. If we don’t teach these skills in school, when else will students learn them? Be prepared for more bad conversations in the office.

So, what can you do to increase participation in a discussion?

Before the discussion:

1) Ask good questions–and have lots of extra questions ready. As you are writing questions, make sure they are open-ended and could have multiple correct responses or interpretations. Questions that merely require a regurgitation of knowledge will die quickly. Ask yourself: what makes this question interesting? Adeyemi Stembridge suggests the thought-experiment model: “What if…” What would happen if…”

2) Give students good material to talk about, and practice note-taking. A lot of bad discussions I have seen (or have been a part of) were bad because there wasn’t any substance to the discussion. In the social studies classroom, I like to give students articles with multiple perspectives on the same issue. You might have students look at several different passages from the same book, or different interpretations of a story.

3) Have students do some pre-writing about the discussion. I usually like to let students know about some of the big-picture questions I am going to ask and have them try to answer them ahead of time. But I think it’s also great to have some questions that you don’t ask until the discussion–in part to make sure that students are actually working together to try to mull about the question (rather than just reciting what they wrote down). For teachers worried about accountability, you can grade student preparation for a discussion, too.

4) Set norms and talk about what a good discussion looks like. Be as explicit as possible. (“You said that we should be respectful. What does it mean to be respectful in a discussion?”)

During the discussion:

1) Have students sit in a circle, and sit down with the students! It is impossible to read body language without being able to see people. And I frequently see teachers standing up over students or standing in front of the classroom during a discussion, which can be intimidating and also conveys that you are evaluating students–not working with them to wrestle with ideas.

2) Doug Lemov suggests that for students who have trouble keeping up with a discussion, charting can helping them engage:

Charting a discussion on the board: it may sound simplistic but one reason participants in a large discussion don’t build off of and refer to one another’s ideas is that they cannot remember them fully or retain it in short-term memory while thinking of their own idea.

3) Don’t be afraid of silence. Sometimes, students need time to think about a question, or sometimes they need time to gather the nerves to participate. An awkward one or two minute silence can provide the impetus needed for even the quietest student to participate.

4) Give students sentence stems that have them practice key elements of a discussion: giving a new idea, building off of others, disagreeing, etc

5) Take a step back and restrain yourself from participating–but don’t be afraid to volley in a question or a piece of evidence students might have missed to keep a conversation going.

6) If a discussion isn’t going well, it can be helpful to stop the discussion and talk about the norms that were set.

After the discussion:

1) One of the most important things you can do is debrief a discussion. While I never grade a discussion, I do like to keep track of how many times people speak to talk about at the end. I keep the data anonymous but use it as a way to bring awareness to the group. “We had five people speak twice, three people speak once, six speak zero times, and one person speak ten times.” This encourages the person who dominated the discussion to reflect a bit on how much more they spoke–and I have found that for many students, this is enough to get them to pull back a bit. At the same time, it makes everyone aware of potential inequities–perhaps based on gender, race, or age. Jackie Walsh even suggests filming the discussion and then reviewing the footage with students, like what you might do with athletes after a game.

2) While I disagree with a lot of Doug Lemov’s beliefs around classroom management, I do like his take for those concerned with how to assess discussion, especially among those who don’t participate. He suggests having students write about one of the discussion questions afterwards to demonstrate that they were mentally engaged in a discussion:

In fact writing is the single most important tool for discussion — a statement that might sound counter intuitive. But writing is critical because it causes every person involved to answer a given question or wrestle with an idea. Just adding this piece allows me to give students another venue to share how they are engaging the discussion. They can write “Here’s what I was thinking…[while everyone else was talking].”

Indeed, many students who “participate” in a discussion may have not actually been engaged in the discussion, and many students who were silent may have actually been very engaged–but this is only possible to tell by assessing students afterwards.

If your first ungraded discussion does not go well, do not worry. Adults are really bad at having good discussions–imagine how hard it is for kids! Learning to discuss well is a difficult skill that requires practice. Moving away from grading discussions can be intimidating, and you may even get flack for it from coworkers and administrators–but it is worth the effort.