Note to Week 3 Facilitation Pairs

Sam & Suyi, Adam & Nathaniel:
Here are some guidelines for facilitating class discussion

• Work should be evenly balanced between the two of you.
• You can glean potential discussion questions from our blog (this won't apply to Sam and Suyi).
• Your goal is to ensure that the class understands the most important concepts from your reading section. Ask questions, pose ideas, provide examples to illustrate difficult concepts, etc. Be thorough--don't skip over any major ideas from your reading. Don't be afraid to disagree with classmates if you feel that they are misunderstanding the text; you can politely offer your own interpretation.
• Keep the discussion going: be prepared to ask follow-up questions in response to things your classmates say. You can gauge when it is time to move on to the next topic.
• Be prepared to offer your own responses to any questions that you may ask. However, your goal is to facilitate discussion, not do all the talking. Only jump in with your own thoughts if you feel it will be helpful to the class.
• Prepare a handout of the key ideas/questions that you would like to cover. Please make 23 copies (1 for each student in the class). It would be an excellent idea to run this by me first, so I can give you feedback.
• You will have about 30-40 minutes to facilitate. Do your best to include everyone. If a few people are doing all the talking, you are absolutely welcome to call on other students. As long as you are polite & keeping everyone on topic, it is up to you how you would like to guide the discussion.
• Having visuals to point to is always helpful (especially since our theme is graphic narrative), but it is not required.

Adam & Nathaniel,

You two will be presenting on UC, Ch. 6 and an article by Mitchell Stephens. I'll be posting that soon as well.

Good luck and thank you for being the first two pairs to lead discussion! Please e-mail if you have any questions at all.