Teaching with and for discussion

Leading productive classroom discussions is difficult, as any one knows who has tried. Teaching future teachers to lead them is doubly difficult - a c ase of teaching beyond one's own understanding. Here we report our reflecti on on our efforts to teach beginning teachers to lead discussions. Our meth od was reflective inquiry, for the central problem we addressed arose from within our teaching, and this is where its solution would have to be worked out. Lisa, one of our student teachers, expressed the problem well: After participating capably in and reflecting upon model discussions that we had led, she said that she had "really no idea how to lead a discussion" hersel f. Our efforts to teach with discussion were surprisingly inconsequential w hen it came to teaching for discussion, where the subject matter is discuss ion itself - its worth, purposes, types, and procedures - and in which case discussion is not a teaching method but a curriculum objective. Against th is problem, we critique methods we have used to teach both with and for dis cussion and present a typology that we developed in order to do both better . (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.