The Skillful Teacher

Keeping Online Discussion Focused
As is the case with face-to-face classroom discussion, its online vari-
ant can easily get sidetracked by one or two particularly strong indi-
viduals whose agendas, passions, or fixations determine what the
rest of the class focuses on. In an online context (as in a face-to-
face classroom), discussion is focused when participants’ exploration
of the topic entails them offering evidence to support their point of
view, explaining the basis for that view, recalling and summarizing
some of the multiple viewpoints that have been shared, attempting
to identify connections between contributions already made, and
showing how the discussion has changed their thinking or added to
their knowledge. The initial responsibility for creating such a focus
lies with the instructor who can work to keep students connected
to the topic by inserting questions and comments such as:
How does your observation relate to the topic of discussion?
What is the connection between your comment and what was
just said?
Can you explain how your idea is helping us to make sense of
this subject matter?
We seem to have wandered away from the main topic. What
do we need to do to get back on track?
Who has a comment or question that can help us regain our
focus?
A teacher’s attempts to model keeping discussion focused, and let-
ting students know this is what she’s doing, is crucial. In different
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ways it is both easier and harder to encourage these behaviors online.
It is easier because students can read comments the instructor has
made and see clearly how the instructor has responded to their ideas.
What makes it harder is the fact that the instructor often cannot
intervene in the middle of an exchange and may even find that once
she has responded, the rest of the group has moved on to another
topic or issue. There are two ways to deal with this problem. One is
to orient students from the outset toward the idea of focused discus-
sion by including references to it in the syllabus and deliberately
attempting to practice it during a required face-to-face orientation.
The other is to be persistent and consistent in asking the kinds of
questions that are listed above while letting students know your pur-
pose is to keep the discussion as focused as possible.
An important element in keeping online discussion focused is
fostering dialogue that is evidence-based or clearly grounded in
some explicit reasoning. Again, it is important that teachers ini-
tially model questions and comments such as those below to get stu-
dents in the habit of thinking through and supporting their
responses:
How do you know what you say is true?
What evidence do you have to support that claim?
What is the source of that point of view?
Whose work that we have studied confirms what you are saying?
By what process of reasoning did you reach that conclusion?
Students should be supported when they pose such questions to
their classmates and hold one another accountable for backing up
comments with evidence, logic, experience, justifications, ratio-
nales, and so on. An important indicator of success is when students
apply these same standards to assessing the teacher’s contributions.
Online instructors can help this process along by publicly subject-
ing their own comments to these focusing questions.
Teaching Online
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204
T
HE
S
KILLFUL
T
EACHER
Keeping focused in online discussion is also helped when partic-
ipants can summarize what they have learned from the conversation.
One way to encourage summaries is to pose a final synthesis question
to the group in real-time online chats. The synthesis question offers
the added bonus of creating a thinking pause in the conversation.
Once the final synthesis question is posed, everyone must withhold
comment until a minute or two has elapsed. Participants are invited
to write their final thoughts as a way of slowing down the pace of the
discussion thus giving participants more time for reflection.
Examples of synthesis questions are:
How has this discussion changed the way you are thinking
about this topic?
What is the most memorable thing you have heard here today?
What question or questions does this discussion prompt you
to ask?
What is something that you learned or relearned here today?
What do you know now that you did not know before this dia-
logue began?
What assumptions that you had about this topic have been con-
firmed or questioned for you by this discussion?
Note that these synthesis questions are not summarizing questions
in the sense of giving a précis of the discussion. Instead they provide
a final reflective moment to think about what has been learned and
what new learning projects have been suggested. Once the habit of
responding to final synthesis questions becomes ingrained, learners
often develop greater proficiency in commenting on the discussion
as a whole. Synthesis questions also heighten the feeling that the
effort participants have put into the dialogue has been worthwhile.
Online environments are especially well suited to practicing this
kind of disciplined dialogue. Unlike live, face-to-face conversation,
asynchronous exchange permits learners a relatively leisurely review
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of everything that has been said. This makes it easier for them to
look for recurring themes, essential questions, and emerging under-
standings. The challenge is to build in ways to redirect students to
previous discussions, so they can review everything that has been
said and record their reflections. Sometimes the online assignments
are so numerous that there isn’t time to revisit previous postings.
Johnson and Aragon (2003) note that one of the biggest problems
with online courses is a tendency toward “information overload”
(p. 37). The solution is, of course, to slow the pace and require
fewer assignments.
The learning pause that occurs in the wake of the synthesis ques-
tion has special value in addressing the problems of live online chat.
Instructors who are interacting in real time online with a small
group of students can leave ten to twelve minutes at the end of the
chat for responses to a final synthesis question. When the question
is posed, all activity in the chat is suspended and participants are
asked to spend the next two or three minutes quietly scrolling back
through the whole dialogue. Each student in turn then offers a
response, taking about a minute to address the synthesis question.
Some sort of rotation should be worked out ahead of time—
assigning numbers to learners may work best. Each respondent
attempts, in some manner, to take account of the content of the
dialogue just reviewed. This has three advantages. First, participants
have the opportunity to review the entire dialogue that has
occurred, thus producing more focused, disciplined, and thoughtful
comments. Second, this procedure avoids the problem of overlap-
ping dialogue. Third, it brings a more relaxed sense of closure to
what can sometimes be a disorienting and frenetic experience.