When to Move On?

I was surprised by how engaged students were in our discussion about the French Revolution, at least at the start. Charlie, a really thoughtful and confident 9th grader, brought up a great point about how the French nobility paid basically no taxes while poor people were literally starving.  Other students ran with this point, making comparisons to modern day inequalities. “It’s not fair that some people have so much while others have nothing. I would revolt, too,” Angela declared. Classmates nodded in agreement, and for a moment it felt like the discussion had a lot of momentum. Then, after a few more minutes, the energy in the room vanished and the conversation stalled. Students were just looking at each other. I even noticed Charlie, the student who had kicked things off, start to doodle in his notebook. I planned for this discussion to be at least 15-minutes long, and we hadn’t even touched on things like the storming of the Bastille or the role of Enlightenment thinkers. I tried to steer students towards these points, but no one responded. Just shrugs. I figured it might be better to just move on to the next activity in my lesson plan at that point even though we hadn’t covered all the content, but I didn’t want to make a hasty decision. I wondered if there was a way to revive the discussion without making it feel forced.