What's wrong with the old standbys?

Question-and-answer is a time-honored format, going back to the Socratic method and no-doubt beyond, and it has its advantages. The teacher can set the terms of the discussion by coming up with thoughtful, provocative questions and can ensure broad participation by calling on reluctant students to contribute. Too often, though, this format can result in one-on-one dialogues between individual students and the teacher and little interaction among students. Also, eager well-prepared students may either dominate discussion or be frustrated when they want to participate more, but the teacher is calling on their hesitant (or unprepared) classmates. Asking questions of the class will probably always be an important and useful part of the classroom experience, but more participatory discussion strategies can ensure more classwide participation and allow students to take a more active role in deciding on the questions to be discussed.

Debates can be a great way to get students more involved in a discussion, and this strategy is already in many teachers' pedagogical toolboxes. Debates can engage students with complex material and raise difficult moral, ethical, and logical questions in the classroom. Through debate, we can help students wrestle with the important questions raised by their texts — Should the U.S. have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Was Hamlet justified in his quest to kill his father's murderer? By asking students to take on the difficult questions in history and literature, we hope to sharpen their analytical skills, deepen their understanding of the subject matter, and help them make connections between course content and broader issues like justice, morality, and right and wrong. The formal structure of a debate can help students develop logical, disciplined arguments and participating in organized debates can help students relate to televised debates such as those leading up to presidential or gubernatorial elections.

Debates can, however, have their problems in a classroom setting. First, any activity in our classroom bag of tricks can get old and cease to engage students if overused. It's easy, when teaching a course with a variety of controversial issues worthy of intense discussion, to rely on the debate format a bit too much. Even if you only use formal debates occasionally, keep in mind that students may have done them before in other classes and may be tired of the format. Second, formal debates have specific rules and decorum associated with them — opening statements, timed rebuttals, closing statements, and other details of a debate may overwhelm students who aren't already familiar with the procedures of a formal debate. In the worst case scenario, you may wind up spending almost as much time teaching students how to debate as you spend debating. All of these rules and procedures can also seem stiff and stilted to students who might prefer a more spontaneous and freely interactive style of discussion.

A third potential problem with debates is that they can set up false dichotomies and unnecessary competitiveness. Because debates are usually organized as pro vs. con on a given issue, they have the potential to set up false dichotomies. Sometimes problems are more complicated than "either-or" can account for, and, in those cases, the debate format can oversimplify complex, multi-faceted issues and suppress more nuanced solutions than a pro vs. con structure can readily account for. In addition, students often view the debate as a win-or-lose proposition. While healthy competition can be a motivating part of classroom dynamics, teachers may not want every discussion to turn competitive. In some cases, students will focus on winning more than they focus on understanding the issues at hand. As a result, they may well only really learn their own "side" of the debate, just understanding the opposite view well enough to discredit and destroy and prove victorious instead of trying to understand all sides in a subtle and comprehensive way.

So while question-and-answer sessions and debates can be important tools in the classroom and very valuable ways of approaching controversial or challenging issues, there are plenty of good reasons to stock your bag of pedagogical tricks with some other strategies as well. The alternatives that follow will provide you with few novel discussion formats that accomplish some of the same pedagogical goals as question-and-answer discussions and debates, but with a bit of a different twist.