Discussion Strategies for History Class

If you pair how often we all communicate via text message and social media, then you look at the debates that take place in the public sphere over political and social issues, it becomes clear how important it is to teach students how to debate issues in a respectful way. This brings me to my research and this post on how to teach discussions in a social studies classroom. What follows are a few strategies that will get you prepared to teach students how to discuss an issue and base what they say on facts.

Pinwheel Discussion

A basic pillar of a history class is to get students to see how different actors of society will have differing points of view based on their world views. A pinwheel discussion gets students to take on the values of a section of society and other students will act as provocateurs to keep the discussion moving. I have used this type of discussion in conjunction with the Choices lessons from Brown University, and wrote about the resource and process in this post.

Socratic Seminar

When students are tasked with reading a long text, a Socratic Seminar can be a way for them to digest and problematize the material. In preparation, students need to all read the same text, and prepare points of interest and higher-order questions that relate to the text. During…