E-Coaching Tip 25: Discussion Wraps -- A Useful "Cognitive Pattern" or "Collection of Discrete Thought Threads?"

How do you close out or wrap up a weekly discussion? Do you have a favorite technique that you have found useful? Do you get your students involved in this process?

Weekly discussions are a basic tool for knowing what students know and think they know. Weekly discussions are also the best tool for creating a sense of a learning community. One aspect of online discussions that is not discussed regularly is how to close out a discussion. What do we want students to "take away" from a discussion?

Envision having a conversation with a colleague and you are enthusing about "how wonderful" the last week's discussion has been. Can you say in one-three sentences what you believe your students are going to remember, think about, question from that discussion?

Here are two effective teaching practices you may want to consider.

(1) Summarize the discussion

Keep in mind what we are doing when we are learning. We are changing and growing links in our brains. We are identifying patterns, finding hidden relationships, delighting in new insights, and pondering challenges and questions for the future.

As students are discussing ideas in the weekly conversations, the various questions, perspectives and ideas that they are bringing into the conversation tend to be broad-ranging and dispersed. Often just as the conversation gets to the point of identifying key challenges and interesting relationships, the week ends and a new topic begins. Often the students are left with wondering questions such as:

• What was that all about?
• Where has this conversation taken me? Taken our group?
• What have I learned? What do I know now that I did not know before?
• What is next? Are there actions that we should pursue at some point?
• Have I changed how I think about these ideas? Or about this problem?
• What are the new challenges ahead?
• What do the experts think about this?
• What does our faculty leader think? (Not that we have to agree, but it is important for students to know our opinion, as we are a guide to the experts, if not one of the experts.)

The purpose of the discussion summary is to bring closure to a topic. This does not mean having answers, but rather identifying the "take-aways," and pruning to the essentials. We know from memory research that we remember very little of what we encounter -- with good reason! (Demasio, 1999) Summarizing the discussion is an opportunity to help the students focus and reflect on the essentials and key concepts: to help remember key issues and develop useful knowledge, rather than vague recollections.

The discussion summary can take one of many forms. Here are four common formats.

• Create a closing discussion thread labeled "Summary," "Wrap-up" "Key Ideas" or labeled with a Key Concept for the week. This will help students with course reviews, etc. (Faculty who teach a particular course each semester can create a template for reinforcing some of the key concepts!)
• Create a separate word document that encapsulates the key postings of the week integrating these statements with the key conceptst
• Create a group summary be asking each student to identify the key concept for them from the discussion. (Concept can be an insight, challenge, action, change, relationship, pattern, etc.)
• Hold a live synchronous -- text chat or audio chat with HorizonWimba -- session with your students and review key idea from a unit of 2-3 weeks and then create a summary from that activity.
• Have a summarizing discussion -- review the concepts from the readings and comment on the discussion and conclusions that ensued.

(2) Involve the Students

Keep in mind that the creative process of preparing a summary from a week's discussion requires advanced skills such as analysis, synthesis, questioning, linking ideas, identifying patterns, etc. Just the types of skills that we desire for our students! As faculty we want to share this type of creative experience!

Literature on group work notes "Each of us has a typical way of acting in a group. Some people like to lead, some act to keep the group focused on the task and some serve to keep the group from taking itself too seriously." (Svinski, 2006) This is just as true for online groups as it is for face-to-face groups. Here are some roles/tasks that are pertinent for online weekly discussion groups.

• Information and opinion giver. Offers facts, opinions, ideas, suggestions, and relevant information to help group discussion.
• Information and opinion seeker. Asks for facts, opinions, ideas, suggestions, and relevant information to help group discussion.
• Summarizer. Pulls together related ideas or suggestions and restates and summarizes main point discussed.
• Coordinator. Shows relationships among various ideas by pulling them together and harmonizes activities of various subgroups and members.
• Diagnoser. Figures out sources of difficulties the group has in working effectively and the blocks to progress in accomplishing the group's goals.
• Reality tester. Examines the practicality and workability of ideas, evaluates alternative solutions, and applies them to real situations to see how they will work.

You may want to solicit students to volunteer to assume one or more of these roles for some of your weekly discussions. In particular, you may want to solicit a volunteer or maybe a team of two to take on the role of Summarizer for a week. If you do assign this task to your student, remember how important your "voice" is in taking the next step of providing confirmation, affirmation or disagreement with the student's summary. As noted, your opinion and next challenges -- as one expert contribution -- is a key component of the community summary from that week's discussion work

Interesting Bits and Pieces

You may want to view a one-minute video clip of Diane Schallert of the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas. In this video clip, Schallert explains why she uses the technique of creating a separate word document for weekly summaries. <www.utexas.edu/academic/blackboard/examples/videos/schallert_02.html> At this same page, Professor Schallert shares the research that supports why she thinks "the process of compiling discussion threads and posting them again increases learning."

Reder and Anderson (1980) showed that college students remember more important material from reading chapter summaries than from reading entire textbook chapters. In addition, Mayer et al. (1996), showed not only that students remember more of the important material when it is presented as a summary but that they also better understand the material.

The references for this research are included in the list below.

Action

Enjoy piloting and trying out some of these strategies!

References

Revised November 8, 2008
Copyright Judith V. Boettcher, 1997-2008