If you use a discussion strategy that’s not mentioned here, please share it below. If you feel very emotional about a message, wait before responding. It’s very easy to write something in the heat of the moment and then wish you could retract it. Even waiting overnight can give you enough distance to respond in a calmer and more professional manner. To air different perspectives or help others clarify their thinking, you may need to contradict a classmate. Remember to disagree respectfully (no name-calling or obscenities) and support your point with evidence.

Thanks For Your Feedback

• Posts that are strictly self-interested or intended to “build awareness” are not acceptable.
• Get others thinking (and writing) by making bold statements or including open-ended questions in your message.
• In a classroom, instructors don’t ask the same question to every learner.
• While the instructor cannot observe all groups at once in a virtual meeting, they might use cloud-based workspaces to track students’ progress.

Encourage students to interact with each other, not just with you. The most effective way to promote student participation is to make it required and graded. After finishing your human bar graph, be sure to discuss patterns and what those patterns might reveal. Michael B. Sherry is an assistant professor in the College of Education at University of South Florida and a former middle and high school teacher. Jill Abney is a faculty instructional consultant at the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching and a part-time instructor in the department of history at the University of Kentucky.

For example, a short paragraph response to the prompt you included in the blog post. Write a list of tips and guidelines and pin it to the top of your message thread for quick reference. Teachers have vital roles in engaging students in online learning platforms. The third step to lead online discussions is to evaluate the learning and engagement outcomes of the discussion.

Section 1: Benefits Of Online Discussions

One of her go-to silent discussion strategies is a Color-Coded Conversation using a shared document. Silent discussion strategies have been gaining momentum in the physical classroom, but they are also convenient for online discussions. Whether you have students at home, in school, or BOTH at the same time, you’re probably looking for ways to engage tweens and teens in meaningful conversations.

Silent Discussions

If a class meeting involves a mix of lecture and discussion, cue that shift explicitly, set a time frame, and let students know the specific goals of the discussion at hand. Should they aim to get a sense of how the class reacted to a reading? Or, will students pitch and critique solutions to a problem they’ve explored? If students don’t need to spend too much cognitive bandwidth on figuring out how to participate, the quality, frequency, and enthusiasm of their participation will rise dramatically. Teachers are likely accustomed to seeing many faces looking back at them, but for students, the interface may feel disorienting and intimidating. It’s useful to name the awkwardness as well as our own misgivings.

Use the time productively to hone lifelong skills and refine your ideas about the course content. Review the discussion guidelines for https://theasiatalks.com/ how long your posts should be. If length is not specified, write one to two meaningful paragraphs because long messages are difficult to read online.

Discussions may look different depending on the delivery format of your course. Below are suggestions on how you can adapt your classroom discussions based on your course format. The fourth step to lead online discussions is to use appropriate tools and platforms that suit your purpose, audience, and context. You should consider the advantages and disadvantages of different options, such as synchronous or asynchronous, text-based or audio-visual, moderated or unmoderated, and public or private.

Publish a list of protocols or rules for your students to follow. This will help maintain order in the discussion and facilitate clear communication. Show your students how you expect them to behave online by setting the tone in your communications with them in the discussion forum.

Look for any students not receiving replies in a discussion. Reply to those students and highlight something important in their posts, share a link to a resource or give examples from your own experiences and invite other participants to comment (as shown above). This strategy gives a student a reply post to respond to while taking the pressure off of him /her to do the follow-up since you are asking anyone to comment.