July 15, 2020 Designing Facilitation Facilitation as a Collaborative Design Process "All of you have been to my office and have seen the stained-glass work that I’ve done. Today we are going to create a stained-glass...
June 17, 2020 Creating Discussion Infrastructures in the Classroom George Wagner invited his colleague Ashley Sackler to visit one of his general education courses to see how he used classroom discussions. Sackler was amazed at what she found. When...
June 4, 2020 The “Climate” of Climate Discussion It would probably surprise few that the tone of climate change discussions has changed considerably over the years. I have been involved as facilitator, participant, or observer in over fifty...
June 3, 2020 Clues, Cues, and Queues…in Online Discussions How can we manage the flow, when conversations shift to videoconferencing? "One of the skills you are going to need to develop is to look for discussion participation clues,” Professor Sonja...
May 27, 2020 Prompting Deeper Discussions Herbert Watson was an English professor teaching a course on American poetry when the COVID-19 pandemic closed the campus. Like faculty members across the country, he quickly shifted to remote...
May 20, 2020 Being a Discussion Catalyst The class had broken up into their discussion groups as usual. But what wasn’t usual was the vigor of the discussion from one group. In fact, it was vigorous enough...
May 13, 2020 Ask Follow-Up Questions–and Listen As the saying goes, Ashley wanted to be the “bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” She just had to be the center of attention. When she...
May 8, 2020 Do Conversations Inspire You? How? Conversations can do so many different things for us: make us feel connected, intrigued, and even alienated. They can also inspire us. The conversations we had during our Winter Concert, Conversation,...
May 6, 2020 Values-Centered Discussions Greg Jackson was dreading today’s class discussion. As the instructor, he had put together discussion groups with a mix of perspectives on the issues being discussed. While the diversity of...
