Discussion Guidelines
Each student will co-lead one discussion during the quarter. Aim for 45 minutes. Meet with Michael and the TAs at the end of the previous class to discuss your plan. The night before your discussion day, submit the current draft of your slides via the online course submission system instead of your critique. Then, email the final version of the slides to the course staff prior to the start of class.
Begin your assignment by defining a very clear learning goal for the class. What will students understand at the end of class that they may not have at the beginning? Decide on 3-4 key ideas from the readings that you would like the students to understand deeply, and structure your discussion strategy around that. As part of that, your discussion should accomplish the following:
- Briefly summarize the papers for those who may have not read them as closely as others. This should take no more than 10 minutes. You can summarize the papers together or separately, whichever you prefer.
- Lead a conversation about the papers, covering topics much like those that would be covered in a critique. You don't need to provide all the content, but you need to be willing to step in at any point when no one else is providing the content. Don't plan on giving a 45-minute monologue. Do come in with a clear set of goals for what you would like to convey.
- Get people talking! One great way to do this is to break people into pairs or small groups for a minute or two to think about a question. Pairs and small groups give more students a chance to participate, and they help students get ideas and words flowing. And by a minute or two, we literally mean 60 or 120 seconds. Inside of class, pair/small group discussion longer than a minute or two tends to lose momentum and fall off track.
- Cover both high- and low-level parts of the readings. What does this research mean? High level concepts are important, they help us anchor on the topic and give us some motivation for a research topic. How was this research accomplished? What technical concepts and methodological strategies were employed? Really dive into a key detail of how a study was performed, or whether the right research question was asked. If it's a technical paper, the discussion should help students deeply understand the key technical ideas.
Before class on the day of your discussion, read through all other students' critiques and weave ideas from them into your discussion, crediting the authors. The critiques are viewable through the course submission system after 1am. It's a nice way to encourage the excellent, thoughtful work that students do in writing their commentaries, and also bring those ideas and their authors into the classtime discussion.
Finally, grade the student commentaries. We recommend grading before or right after class while everything is fresh. Don't spend a huge amount of time on this -- essentially, the goal is a "check", "check-plus", "check-minus" grading system, based on the depth of student's intellectual engagement with the paper's core ideas. In general, the majority of commentaries get a 'check', with exemplary commentaries getting a 'check-plus' and weaker ones getting a 'check-minus'. That said, this class is not graded on a curve, so any particular day may or may not match that general trend. Enter grades through the admin interface. You will have admin access for two days following your discussion day.
In evaluating your discussion, the course staff will use the following rubric:| Category | Insufficiency | Adequacy | Proficiency | Mastery |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Summarization 4 points |
1: No clear high-level ideas presented from the readings, or missed the major points. | 2: The high-level ideas from the readings are present, but muddled, incorrect, or buried. | 3: Presents the high-level ideas from the readings, with some minor presentation or interpretation issues.. | 4: The high-level ideas from the readings are clearly conveyed with insight and precision. |
| Insight 4 points |
1: No meaningful questions raised about the reading in the public forum. | 2: Questions and insights posed for discussion were straightforward extensions of the papers. | 3: Raised questions and insights that demonstrated some critical thinking, but some points were somewhat shallow. | 4: Raised questions and insights to the class that displayed clarity of thought and prompted new perspectives on the papers. |
| Technical detail 3 points |
1: Details from the reading --- implementation approach, study design and result interpretation, or argument --- are left unexplained or barely touched. | 2: Relevant technical detail --- implementation approach, study design and result interpretation, or argument --- are not explained to sufficient depth, or are focused on too heavily. | 3: Technical details --- implementation approach, study design and result interpretation, or argument --- are explained clearly to students who may not have understood them, without getting derailed by too much detail. | |
| Integration 2 points |
1: Students' commentaries were integrated in a surface-level fashion. | 2: Students' commentaries were woven into the presentation to add color and perspective to the discussion points and spark in-class discussion. | ||
| Conversation 2 points |
1: Let the conversation drift, asked questions too open-ended and prompted a lot of dead time during discussion, or otherwise produced a poorer in-class learning experience. | 2: Guided the students' discussion toward active participation and conversation. | ||