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Writing good discussion prompts July 8, 2020

Posted by aquillam in teaching.
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This post assumes you’ve read my previous post, creating effective and engaging discussions.

Numerous studies have shown that students learn best when they learn socially. Learners retain more information and are better able to synthesize it, recognize assumptions, challenge misconceptions, and utilize it in novel or creative ways if they interact with other students. In distance or blended learning classes, the asynchronous discussion forum is often the tool of choice for facilitating social learning. However, simply creating a discussion board is not enough. You need to help them build  their learning community, which requires both social presence and cognitive engagement. Students need to see each other as real people, with an emotional presence in the class. If they think they matter to their peers, they are more likely to be willing to do the extra work of really engaging with their peers over the material. The rules you set and the involvement you take help to determine how involved the students will be, but you can also use prompts that encourage diverse thinking, and the sharing of ideas. The level of the prompts largely determine the level of cognitive engagement. Read more about creating effective and engaging discussions here, or check the resources at the end. I’ll focus on constructing the prompts below. 

Good discussion prompts should guide students toward higher order cognitive skills by facilitating discussion. Remember, the goal is to get students to have a conversation with each other, not to respond to the primary prompt. Bloom’s taxonomy (see below) lists the order of cognitive skills as: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. When grappling with new knowledge, students tend to focus on the recall and understanding steps, but those can be assessed with something like an auto-graded quiz. The point of the discussion is to get them to engage more deeply. 

You may be able to write a single prompt that will ask them to analyze or evaluate, or you may need a scaffolded set of prompts to build toward those higher levels. Don’t forget your prompt needs to be structured in such a way that it encourages conversation, like limiting the number of people who reply directly to the prompt, so they have to reply to each other. These prompts take careful crafting to work well, but usually take less intervention to keep them going.  

You may also want to consider a structured type of prompt, such as problem solving, project based, or debate prompts. These more structured types often lead to both greater involvement (as determined by the number of posts) and  higher levels of cognition (as determined by the level of skill shown in the post content.) However, these also usually require more attention on the part of the instructor. A debate, for example, may require a thread for the initial brainstorm of ideas, followed by group assignment and facilitation of group discussions to develop a group argument, and finally moderation of the class debate. Consider how many students you have, how many GSIs can help you, and whether you can remove some other assessment (maybe the debate replaces a homework assignment.) If you can manage the workload, the enhanced student engagement is well worth it. 

So now that you have some idea about the different types of prompts, let’s talk about formulating the prompts. 

Every prompt (every piece of work, really), should be relevant to what you want students to get out of your class, so start by considering your learning goals. What learning goals do you want covered by this discussion? What outcomes would show you that they have achieved those goals? What outcomes involve higher level skills? If you were to have a conversation with friends or family about that outcome, what would it look like, and how might it start? Are there open questions or ideas up for debate? Could it be posed as a problem to be solved? Does it connect to a larger class project? Should the students have enough information when the prompt is posted to be able to generate a conversation? These questions should give you the foundation for designing your prompt(s). 

A standard structure for discussions is to require a response to the original prompt, plus two responses to peer’s posts. That works well for small classes or group discussions, and has a nice structure if you have different deadlines for the original replay and the peer responses. However, in a large class, that quickly becomes unwieldy for both you and the students. Offer them options, like responding to your prompts or to their peers, from the beginning. For example, ask a “what do you know, what do you want to know” question and give students the option to reply to a previous response with expansion or clarification of the knowledge, related questions, and thoughts about how to answer the questions. If the conversation lags, or if it isn’t at the level you want, you can join it by asking your own questions. “I see many people want to know more about [topic]. Why is that interesting to you? What knowledge do you think you’ll need? What have you learned that made you think of that?” 

Prompts with multiple requirements dependent on prior responses are useful for scaffolded discussions. Brainstorming, or general invitation questions are good starting points. They activate prior knowledge and get students started sharing ideas. However, those types of  prompts generally don’t illicit much interaction on their own, and their cognitive level is down there at the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy. They tend to illicit a lot of “I totally agree, I like [thing] too!” peer responses.  You can push the level up by asking for value judgments or consensus, then ask for solutions or next steps. For example, “Due Tuesday: If you are one of the first 10 people to respond, post a challenge to accomplishing [thing] and explain what makes it a challenge. If there are already 10 responses, pick the response that you think poses the greatest challenge and explain why you think it is the greatest challenge. Due Friday: look at other people’s responses to what poses the greatest challenge, and pick one that you don’t agree with. Explain how you think that challenge can be overcome. Alternatively, respond to the responses to your earlier post.” By staging the steps in the original prompt, you’re laying out the plan, so students can prepare to write their responses. You’re also enforcing interaction by requiring that most of the responses actually be responses to students, not to you. Finally, you’re giving them some autonomy, by offering them options around how to engage. 

Open-ended prompts with a variety of reasonable responses are the most likely to engage higher level thinking. Prompts that ask students to reflect on course material and incorporate it to make some sort of judgement seem to be the most effective at achieving higher level thinking. You can help generate the sense of community by asking students to reflect on other posts. Follow that up again by asking them to respond to the people who responded to their posts. Make sure the discussion ties in to the course by matching it to the learning goals, or by using it as the foundation for other assignments. You might use a prompt like the previous example to assign groups for a project to come up with solutions to the challenges, or vote on which challenge is the biggest and set up a debate for whether or not we should try to overcome the challenge. 

You can also use the prompts to drive students to help each other out. Set up a standing, non-required discussion for “it’s in the syllabus” questions and encourage its use (you can refer to it, send students there when they ask questions appropriate for it, give extra credit for students who are helpful, thank the extra helpful ones…) Set up homework or exam review threads.  For example, a week (or more) before the exam, ask students for the three most difficult problems, then ask them to help each other out. Or ask them to try and write exam questions, but specify that they have to be higher on Bloom’s taxonomy than recall or understanding. Give them topic headings and ask them to fill in what they know. 

Most discussion boards will allow you to set up groups, including an option for groups of 1. If you want to use a more formal prompt type, you’ll likely want to take advantage of that. For example, if you want the class to hold a debate, you’ll need to break them into teams. You might also break them into groups to tackle a problem. For example, if you give them a really big challenge, like getting humans to Mars, you might start with a brainstorm/ biggest challenge post for the whole class, then split them into groups to tackle one individual challenge per group, then bring them back together again to make sure their solutions aren’t conflicting. You can even use discussion boards to mimic think-pair-share, or 1-2-4-all (think-pair-small group-full class sharing) techniques. One person groups offer the opportunity for journaling or metacognitive questions: “Compare your first two posts and most recent two posts. Which ones show the highest level cognitive engagement? How do you judge that? What was it about that post that engaged you on that level? Do you think this discussion board is helping you improve your critical thinking skills?”

Finally, a good prompt will be transparent, and accommodating. If you supply your students with the course learning goals, the prompt should tell them what goals you hope to reach with this discussion prompt. It should tell them what sources you expect them to pull from (book chapter(s), links to reading materials…) Requirements, including deadlines and formatting,  should be clear. Provide links to services they might need (e.g. if they’re likely to want video, include links to the video and captioning how-tos). Check your prompt for accessibility standards. 

And, don’t forget to keep a document somewhere with the prompt and any notes, like whether or not it was good, or needed improvement. Future you will thank you for it! 

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