Discussion Ground Rules

The steps

1. Agree the rules with the class, and keep the list short. Propose three or four rules and invite the class to help word them. A strong starting set: one voice at a time; build on or challenge the idea, never the person; give a reason for every claim; everyone contributes. Students tend to defend rules they helped to write.
   We'll have discussions in here every week, so we need rules for how they run. Here are my four. What would you change?
2. Give every rule words students can say. Pair each rule with a sentence stem, and display the rule and its stem together. "Build on the idea" becomes "I'd like to add…". "Challenge the idea" becomes "I disagree, because…". Without the words, students can agree to a rule and still not know how to follow it.
3. Practise one rule at a time. Run a short discussion on a low-stakes question, with the whole class focusing on a single rule.
   Today we practise one rule: every claim needs a reason. If you hear a claim without one, ask: 'What makes you say that?'
4. Referee lightly, and point at the rule. When a rule is broken, name it in passing and keep the discussion moving:
   One voice. Maya, you're next.
   Let the rule do the correcting, and keep your tone light.
5. Hand the refereeing to the class. Teach students that anyone may invoke a rule, including against you. Within a few weeks, "What makes you say that?" should be coming from the class as often as from you. Then chair less: start the discussion and stay out of it where you can.
6. Revisit the rules when talk decays. Every few weeks, ask the class which rule is going well and which has slipped. Practise the slipped rule again on an easy question. Expect to reteach the set after every holiday.

How you’ll know it’s working

• Contributions begin to link. Tally one ten-minute discussion: most turns now begin by adding to or disagreeing with the previous speaker, rather than starting a new thread aimed at you.
• Claims arrive with reasons attached. You hear "because" in most answers without needing to ask for it.
• Students invoke the rules on each other. "What makes you say that?" and "one voice" now come from the class, not only from you.
• You intervene less often. Count how often you speak during one discussion each fortnight; the number should drop.

Weigh it up

Why it’s worth it

• Discussion begins to build. Students answer each other instead of routing every comment through you, so one good question can sustain several minutes of linked thinking.
• Group work needs less policing. The same rules govern Turn & Talk, pair work and small-group tasks, so off-task drift tends to shrink in every format that uses talk.
• Answers grow reasons everywhere. Once "give a reason" becomes habit, it appears in ordinary questioning and in written paragraphs, where a claim followed by its reason forms the skeleton of analytical writing.
• You hear the thinking behind wrong answers. A discussion run under the rules surfaces misconceptions while there is still lesson time left to address them.
• The practice seems to transfer. In the Thinking Together studies, classes taught the rules went on to score higher on reasoning tests taken individually, away from the group.

The costs

• The setup is real, and the maintenance never quite ends. Agreeing, wording and practising the rules takes parts of several lessons, and the set decays each term and after every holiday.
• Early rule-following talk sounds stilted. For the first few weeks students recite the stems, and discussion loses pace while the moves become natural.
• The rules need questions worth discussing. A closed recall question gives "build on the idea" nothing to work with, so you have to plan genuine points of dispute into lessons, which takes extra planning time.