In this episode, Amalie and Camie talk about ways to improve discussions.

Transcript

I think maybe you can.

Welcome to the pedagogy toolkit. In this episode Amalie and Camie discussed two myths that deal with student engagement, the myth that student discussion and problem solving always works.

So the dreaded online discussion board.

What is the first thing that pops into your mind when you?

Your discussion board.

I think.

The same setup every time.

Every class I've taken as a student is the same.

Here's your prompt. Post your response, read your classmates responses. Respond to to.

Yes.

That and honestly, I get a little just sense of dread in my heart every time my shoulders tense up a little bit because I know for me, like my brain automatically connects that with dull, uninteresting, and just get this done.

Flat compliance, right, right.

It's not.

Engaging to me in any way.

Now it feels like that.

I'm checking to make sure you're engaged, so look engaged.

Yes.

But.

But those are not the things that you get, right. You get those really flat responses of.

I really liked that the author said XY and Z and I think this topic is really great and I think that we should do more of it and in everyday life.

And then or you get something that sounds really wordy and doesn't actually answer the problem. No. And a lot of Times Now we're seeing that AI the students are using AI.

Oh.

It will talk a lot about the topic of whatever you put in your prompt, but will not actually address the prompt.

That's.

Problem with lots of flowery words.

Yeah, they'll sound really smart.

It sounds real pretty.

Real smart.

Or you get the people who go completely off the rails onto, you know, like a political rant.

Conspiracy theory.

And so.

It's hard sometimes to set these up well because these are not, you know, in person discussions where you can immediately turn people around or something like that. If you see things going off the rails or if it becomes really flat, you can't ask one of those really open-ended questions, right?

Or can you?

I think maybe you can.

So.

In discussions.

What we get?

Is flat.

An AI.

Non response, yeah or off the rails.

Nonsense.

We've got these three kinds of things, but that is not what we're after when we set.

These things up.

We're after engagement, right? We're asking students to extrapolate facts that they've seen in the readings and lectures and articles that they've read and.

Do something, apply them.

Right. We often, I mean, we often when we're working with instructors say to them that's great that you want them to know this information. What do you want them to do with it.

And so the discussion board ends up as a place where students can demonstrate what they know how to do with this knowledge.

Right discussion boards are oftentimes where students are actually meeting course objectives. Like you know when they have to analyze something, apply, evaluate all of those things because you can't do that in a multiple choice quiz. Really not well anyway.

And synthesize right.

Especially if part of the objective is to discuss.

You certainly can't do that. It's true, discussing sort of involves discussion.

Right. You you got to.

Write words. It's amazing how that works out.

So in that.

We can ask students to look at a video and apply what they've learned. We can ask them to problem solve something.

But.

Unless we are.

Guiding that discussion, unless we've set them up with the facts that they need, unless we have modeled what a good discussion should look like, not only before they ever discuss anything, but also during the discussion and unless we are monitoring what is happening in the discussion.

Them.

It's really easy for us to get those first three types of responses.

So what we look for in a discussion, let's pretend that.

We have a problem solving discussion.

OK.

Solve the world we've asked students to read this article.

And I'm going to go with this article that I.

Just read the other day, OK?

An analogy in this article says you can't set an attacking field for a fast bowler in cricket without first knowing how to play cricket.

That makes me laugh because I don't know what it means, and I've I've watched a fair bit of cricket. I right. I sat and watched some just a couple weeks ago, but I don't. And I I I don't know what those words mean, right. Like I know that a bowler is like the picture.

Like I know some things about cricket.

No, there's wickets.

I know.

Great.

But I I don't know what this means at all, and this article was not about cricket or sports. OK, it it wasn't. And so I'm not sure what to do with that as a student. And so we have to make sure that the things we're giving, whether they are analogies or content facts and think about the knowledge.

And content of your field or discipline.

That's what you're trying to get students to get to for your course.

And when you put in crazy analogies like.

This.

That means something to you, but maybe don't mean anything to your students.

It has to be meaningful to them. They have to be. You want them to be specific to what you're talking about, #1. So this sports analogy in an article about education really fell flat with me. Right, because it.

Ohh it did not expand my understanding. Let's just say that.

I remembered working with the woman who was my my mentor when I started as a teaching, as a TA, and we were in a class one time and she asked the students something and they whatever the.

Something I can't even remember what it was about, but the students answered something about Cinderella.

And and she initially thought the student meant the band.

It turned into a delightful misconnection of that because.

My mentor was just older enough.

That Cinderella was right in her wheelhouse, and these students were just young enough that they had no idea what she was talking about. And she tried to make these discussions about said and it didn't go well at all.

That's really forgotten about that until just this moment.

Say that happens to all of us.

As ohh yes.

And you're talking about something that you think is really relevant in your mind is just common knowledge and it's not.

It's not. It's not. You're an old so.

To problem solve.

In a discussion right, you have to have very specific facts, yet has specific facts about the field about the topic.

And about the problem. Yeah, right. So in a discussion, even if you're not problem solving, you have to set your students up with all of those things, no matter what you're asking them to do, because in essence, we're problem solving in every discussion we're asking them about a specific set of things and asking them to apply something else.

Whether that's for a solution or for, you know, clarification or whatever it is, we are in essence going through those same kinds of steps.

If they don't know enough about what their.

Discussing.

They don't know they they can look at their menu of skills to choose from, and they don't know which skills to pull. They don't know which facts they need. They don't. If they don't know enough about what they're.

Right, talking about and I will say so I.

Thing.

I have I have an instructor who also has been using AI again to.

Creates skeletal outlines for all of her lecture videos and.

This is.

Like it's basically just.

Specific questions that draw out the information that she wants students to focus on, so it's just questions. It's a list of questions that's just going to outline. It's not anything real fancy.

But she uses AI to give her kind of foundation. If it says something, you know she doesn't want, she removes that. She adds in questions that she may want, but it gives her a foundation to start with.

And that gives students something to focus on. It lets them know what facts they need, because those are the facts they're going to be doing something with.

I know there are several of us here at Global campus who in our.

In our templates for the classes that we're developing, we'll have a section that is things to keep in mind for each lesson overview, and that's exactly that. It's giving the students a target for what they need to kind of keep in the back of their mind what they need to pay attention to what information they.

Need to.

To know is relevant to pullout.

Exactly. And you know, in something like a skeletal outline, it keeps them engaged in that specific lecture because they're answering questions. So they're listening more actively.

It.

It's just helpful all around and it gets them the facts that they need to do the things. The other thing you need when you're doing these discussion boards is to.

So.

What skills right? You need to know how to do the thing that you're being asked to do. Uh, you need to know what you're being asked to do, and you need to have had some kind of practice or modeling of that skill.

Because you don't know how to hit a target if you've never if you.

Can't see it right? It was going to say it's easy for us to say.

They should know how to answer a question in a discussion board, or they should know how to respond to somebody. But if every discussion board they've ever done, they've treated they that we talked about at the beginning. Why? Why would they know how?

Their brains, yes.

To do this and we have to remember too that.

Well, we're fighting what our brains have automatically checked out when they hear the word discussion board. Yes, because mine automatically checks out when I hear the word discussion board. And I work with them all the time, so I know that they're.

Yeah.

All like that. We have some really good discussion of what's going on in some of our classes, but my brain still just trades back to well and I've been working with a professor and I'm super excited to see how this pans out in the class after she teaches it in her initial information to the students, like in the syllabus.

She has examples of what a good response looks like.

Examples of what a good response to the response looks.

Like.

And really gives them something to see so that they've got their requirements, they've got their guidelines, they've got their rubric. They also have an example. So that's goes back to that universal design for learning. We can, there's all these different touch points, so they can see what they're being asked to do.

From lots of different perspectives.

Exactly. And that's what we're looking for. The other thing in discussions.

If you're not monitoring, you don't know when things are falling flat. You don't know when students are using AI to not even answer your prompt. You don't know when they're going off the rails, so monitoring that is really important so that you can get to the guiding part.

Because guiding within is also kind of a form of modeling, because you'll be responding to these.

And hopefully.

We're not responding to take over the discussion, right? I know a lot of times in discussion boards, students also like their brain automatically goes, oh, the instructor has said this. That is the end even if the instructor is not meaning to become the expert there. If if something is mentioned.

Right.

Well, that's what the professor said. So that's what it must.

Instead of.

Keeping that conversation going, extending the conversation, extending the learning, that's what we're trying to do when we participate, right when we guide the conversation, we want to guide it in certain directions, but we want to do that in something that you and I have talked about before on the podcast, and that is with really great open questions. Absolutely a good open question.

If the best is if it's a question you genuinely don't know the answer to, or genuinely want the answer to and not that you already know what the answer is.

That's the key is it's it's figuring out how to ask this how to ask that information so that.

It gives it's. How to ask that information? How to ask that question so that the student?

Doesn't feel like they're having to. There's a right or wrong, right?

And that's hard. It is hard. It's a skill that, you know, we all have to work on. I still have to work on it myself, and it's because it's constantly reflecting on wait, what?

Did what I just say communicate to other people? It's not. What did I mean when I said this? Right. It's like stepping back from what you just said or type and going, how's the other person going to view that?

That that's a really hard thing to learn, too. Of that, what I meant is not what's important. What was received is what is important. There's the punishment is all about, for example, punishment is all about.

The person being punished if they don't perceive it as punishment, it's not punishment, and vice versa. If they do perceive it as punishment, then it is, it doesn't matter.

If you.

Thought it wasn't, had a had a dog that would jump on the counter and I just had it with him one day and he kept jumping on the counter, kept jumping on it.

And I was at the dish. I was doing dishes, and I turned the sprayer on him.

And he loved it. He thought it was great. I had another dog that if I had done that, she would never have come back in the kitchen again.

It it it it's it depends. It has nothing to do with.

What I meant right?

Well, you know that saying perception is reality. Yes and I.

Both love that saying for things like this and hate.

It for other other things.

But but it but it can be true like what? What you're perceiving that that is where you're living. And so reflecting back on what you said to make sure that.

How are they receiving this? Are they receiving this as this is the end of the conversation because now I have spoken? Or are they receiving this as oh, let me think that through and.

Look at this in a different way, and that's a. That's a really hard line to walk well. And sometimes you have to tell a little white lie and say, oh, I hadn't ever thought of it that way before. Yes, dear students. You know, let them believe that they are geniuses who came up with.

Information that no one had ever thought of. Let them have that moment.

Before.

Yeah. Well, because it is new information for them and they should be excited about it. And and like you said earlier, you know this is really about a journey of.

Learning together.

And so, sometimes legitimately, students may come up with things that you haven't thought of before, but when they don't. But it's new to them, you can say ohh, that's a really interesting point. I hadn't thought of it that way before, have you?

Thought.

Of right this this and this because that leads them into a dialogue.

And a dialogue requires 2 yes, minimum of two. It has to be a back and forth. It can't just be you.

Saying yes, you're right or no, you're wrong.

Right.

So looking at feedback guiding the discussion so that students are going where we need them to go, but also.

Not in a way that that ends the discussion, right. So we're being careful about that.

But our biggest thing is to kind of overcoming this discussion. Board paralysis is what I think of it as.

Where?

You know.

Discussion boards don't always work. We know this, that's that is the myth that is busted. They don't always work and so.

Coming up with ways that they can work because they are important, it is important to engage with your colleagues and your instructor with.

The topic and the skills that you are learning in that class, that's how you grow. But we need to start by giving students the facts that they need and skills they need to do that we need to model what they should be doing, monitor their progress and guide them through it.

That's it. Those are the keys. That's it.

Thanks everyone for joining us here on the Pedagogy toolkit. Don't forget to subscribe.