5% of your overall class grade
During the first two weeks of class, you will sign up (or be assigned) a class session later in the semester during which you will help lead discussion. The discussion portion of each class will be around 40 minutes long. In order to successfully lead class discussion, you will need to:
- Send 3 discussion questions, prompts, and/or activities to me via Slack by 10am the day BEFORE the class you are leading (or earlier). These materials should be created by you individually/on your own.
- Confer with any fellow students who are also leading class that day to come up with a plan. You should share your discussion questions with each other and decide if you want to facilitate an activity or exercise to get discussion rolling, how you want to prompt the class to speak, etc.
- Come to class prepared to speak about the readings, including about specific quotes or sections that you found especially inspiring, challenging, or surprising.
This guide on how you lead class discussions, from Carleton College, has tips and other helpful insights.
Grading Rubric
A successful class discussion will involve:
- Preparing questions/activities in advance and submitting them on time
- Clearly having a plan for the discussion time
- Patiently encouraging the class to share their thoughts, insights, and perspectives on the assigned readings and materials
- Creatively moving the conversation along, either if it peters out or if it gets too far off track
