This summer I taught a six-week graduate seminar on Florida’s Black history. The course represented a couple of firsts for me: my first time teaching a course focused specifically on the subject, my first time teaching a graduate seminar online, and my first time setting intentional norms for class discussions.
I got the idea from a Lumen Circles fellowship program on evidence-based teaching that I participated in last spring. It was geared toward undergraduate instruction, and the only courses coming up on my calendar were for graduate students. So when we got to talking about using discussion norms to foster belonging in the undergraduate classroom I thought, Graduate seminars are a different beast—this doesn’t really apply to me.
Then I remembered graduate courses that I’ve taught in the past where discussion norms would have been really helpful. (And if I’m being honest, I would have benefited from such norms when I was a graduate student who sometimes confused snarky comments with intellectual engagement.) My teaching often focuses on the historical context for hot-button issues, and here class discussions can get passionate—sometimes to the point that feelings are hurt, students disengage, and managing the classroom becomes stressful. The problem in these cases was not that students disagreed with or challenged one another, but that the tenor of our conversations got in the way of genuine listening and learning. In retrospect, we really could have used an agreed-upon set of discussion norms to get us back on track.
So for my online seminar this summer, I made setting these norms one of our first tasks as a class. First, I asked students to write a short discussion board post responding to the following questions:
- What does respect look like in this space?
- How can we make this space where we can feel brave to speak up and engage with each other? How should we respond when we feel uncomfortable?
- What expectations do we wish to set so that we can all make the most of our time together?
- Finally, how do we want to respond when someone breaks a community expectation? What will accountability look like in our space?
Then I asked them to annotate and comment on a set of draft discussion ground rules adapted from Juan C. Garibay, “Creating a Positive Classroom Climate for Diversity.” Once they were done, I incorporated their feedback into the final set of ground rules.
I have to say that discussions—all of which were done using audio and video comments on VoiceThread—went exceptionally well. Having discussion norms in place also helped me to feel more secure as an instructor, because I knew that I had taken care to set us up for success as a learning community. This is something that I’ll definitely be carrying forward in my teaching.
If you’d like to do the same, feel free to borrow any and all of this. If you click “File” and “Make a copy” on the discussion ground rules Google Doc above, you can save it to your Google Drive account to edit for your own purposes. And of course this is just one way to engage students in setting ground rules for your learning space—feel free to share your own approaches in the comments below.
