2 Hour Professional Development

Before The Lesson: To prepare, review the lesson plan and materials below.  We recommend you choose one theme for your PD based on the nine themes featured on the DISCUSS website:

1. How do I plan engaging discussions?
2. How do I get students to actively participate?
3. How do I support student-centered or student-led discussions?
4. How do I motivate students to use/interpret the text(s)?
5. How do I support students in reaching my content-related learning goals?
6. How do I build and sustain a safe and supportive classroom climate for discussion?
7. How do I respond when students make challenging, problematic, or inaccurate comments?
8. How do I incorporate students' identities and lived experiences?
9. How do I navigate ethical tensions that arise when facilitating discussion?

We recommend you familiarize yourself with all (approximately ten) dilemmas from your chosen theme, and then encourage you to choose one dilemma from this theme to discuss as a whole group in step three of the lesson plan below.

Lesson Plan Guide:

1. Present Introductory Slides on Discussion (10 min) 

These slides introduce the DISCUSS Philly project and emphasize that discussions are interactive, center student sensemaking, and help build collective knowledge.  They can take many forms, but differ in substantial ways from IRE or serial share-outs from groups or individuals. 

2. Facilitate a “Turn and Talk” on what our staff finds challenging about making social studies discussion-based (10 min)
   1. What do discussions look like in your classroom?
   2. What do challenges have you encountered when facilitating discussions in the social studies clasroom?

As you debrief the turn and talk, you might consider what is surfaced: what beliefs do teachers’ express about discussion, what goals do teachers have around discussion, how do they tend to conduct discussions, and what is their degree of self-efficacy as discussion facilitators? How might the challenges they describe relate to the dilemma theme you have chosen for the workshop?

3. Present Introductory Slides on Dilemmas (10min)

These slides emphasize that dilemmas reflect arguments that happen within yourself between two things (goals/beliefs, etc.) that are difficult to resolve.  You may never completely resolve them, but you can figure out the source of the tension, and manage your dilemmas more deliberately.  

The Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI) is helpful in breaking down the parts of a dilemma, or what makes it challenging.  The DSMRI thinks about every person as holding a lot of identities (i.e. daughter, friend, social studies teacher, community theater actor) and that the identity you inhabit in any given moment is dependent on the social role you inhabit in that moment.  In this PD, we’re interested in getting inside participants’ teacher role identities, or more specifically, their discussion facilitator role identities.  While facilitating a discussion, the DSMRI holds that teachers’ actions are a product of the interplay of four components: their beliefs, their goals, their action possibilities, and their self-perception.  In looking at dilemmas today, we are exploring those times when two parts of this identity system are in tension, which produces a dilemma for one of our novice teachers. 

4. Walkthrough a website dilemma with teachers (30 minutes)
   1. Read and/or view the classroom video of the dilemma you have selected and discuss DISCUSS website prompts (see below for additional guidance.)
   2. Facilitate a discussion about whether this is a dilemma the teachers in the room experience or observe, what aspects of the dilemma are relevant to them, and how they deal with the tensions provoked by this dilemma when facilitating discussions.

Once you have a chance to inhabit the presenting teacher’s perspective, you can move to teachers’ own perspectives on this dilemma as discussion facilitators and discuss the questions: