Oral Communication in the Disciplines. Deanna P. Dannells

on our information, what conclusions can we draw?”“Where are the points of overlap?”“Where do we agree?”Divergent: To develop open-minded thinking, discover new ways of approaching an issue, show connection, focus attention on many elements“How else might we approach this?”“If you were to research this topic, how would you proceed?”

      The second step is to clearly identify the structure of the task. Given what you are trying to accomplish at this point in your course, as well as the character of students in your course, does it make sense to use a more or less structured exercise? Will you have students do small-group discussions in order to try to gain insight into a text? How structured do these small-group discussions need to be? What kind of preparation will students need in order to be ready to ask the kinds of questions that will lead to insight, and be able to talk intelligently in response (for example, reading the text, preparing discussion questions, freewriting, journal-writing, outlining essential arguments)? Will this be an in-class debate? Micro presentations? Poster presentation? Discussion? Role play? Pair-and-share (see example at the end of this chapter)? Will the task be completed fully in class or will there need to be preparation work or follow up work outside of class? How much class time will you devote to the activity and how much out-of-class time (if any) will students need to devote to the preparation and/or follow-up?

      The third step is to identify the content with which they will work. Is it a particular text? A chapter in the book? Their own opinions? Web-based research they will do during the activity? Experiential events? Clearly specifying the content they need to have read, found, experienced, generated, or otherwise prepared will make the process more efficient and will help students prepare.

      Fourth, you will need to design prompts that lead to multiple responses and that have varied audiences. A prompt that has one right answer will likely not lead to discussion, and students will likely find the process to be one of busy work. The best communication tasks/prompts have a breadth of possible answers and responses (see Chapter 7, Class Discussion, for more information on question-asking). Ideally, prompts should encourage students to look for answers, but also lead students to even more questions. For example, if you are having students engage in a mock psychological client role-play, use multiple psychological problems in the plays and perhaps each “client” brings to the role-play a different psychological profile. There needs to be room for true inquiry, with openness for discovery. If there is a “right” answer, then inquiry might be “how did you get there?” Such an approach will help explicate the methods of your discipline, surfacing how inquiry works.

      Fifth, designate guidelines for interaction and consider relational issues that might emerge. How much time will you give students? Will they leave class or stay in the classroom? Will you ask one person to be a recorder? Is the material controversial? Is it likely that participants may become angry, concerned, fearful of potentially offending others in the class, or be reminded of difficulties in their own life? How will you address these possibilities (see Section III for discussions of approaches to these kinds of difficult situations)?

      Sixth, articulate clear expectations for the outcomes of the exercise. Students need to know what they are aiming for; provide that direction by giving instructions for reporting products and processes. Depending on how you structure your exercise, not every student has to talk every time. Nor do students have to turn something in. For example, the outcome of an exercise may be one student from a small group reporting back to the class for a large class discussion on the section of the text assigned to that group. Yet another outcome might be for students to identify possible paper topics as a result of the discussion.