What do we mean by discussion and debate?

We use the terms discussion and debate to refer to various ways that teachers can engage students in classroom talk. Research indicates that when teachers use discussion and debate, they can help students gain deeper understanding of the concepts and ideas in their textbooks and other curriculum materials.

Discussions involve the teacher and students: the teacher encourages students to share and clarify their thoughts. The teacher encourages students to listen to one another and to dig deeper into the ideas they are discussing. Finally, students begin to move beyond their own thoughts and to consider and discuss the ideas of their classmates.

Debates are planned classroom activities in which one particular claim or idea is discussed, and then students plan together to present their positions on the central claim or idea. The focus is not on winning or losing the debate – the purpose is to develop students’ abilities to think through a set of claims or arguments, in order to deepen their understanding and enhance their ability to learn.

Why are discussion and debate part of the CCDD work?

The CCDD study focuses on reading for understanding. In our view, robust understanding requires students to engage in perspective taking, complex reasoning, and academic language skills. But how do we encourage these things to happen? In this project, we are using discussion and debate as the driver of these components of reading for understanding.

The CCDD study explored the potential of well-structured discussion to serve as a context for acquiring deep comprehension skills and for motivating knowledge construction from texts. We believe that discussion also offers a way to reveal student understandings and progress to teachers. For students at all skill levels, discussion provides opportunity for supported practice with perspective taking, complex reasoning, and skilled use of academic language.

For students with below-grade-level reading skills, we believe that classroom discussion is particularly important. It provides a critical opportunity for exposure to the academic language and higher-order reasoning skills required in the middle grades. These students struggle when their only contact with the necessary academic language and higher-order reasoning skills is in written form, in their textbooks. Classroom discourse is, we argue, the most promising leverage point for supporting critical reasoning based on a text.

Word Generation and STARI coaches worked closely with teachers to help them learn how to hold effective, structured discussions and debates in their classrooms. Further, both curricula embed many opportunities for students to discuss the material through partner talk, whole-class discussions, and formal debates.

This focus is dictated by the expanding body of evidence concerning the contributions of well-structured classroom discussions to literacy outcomes, including writing sophistication and reading comprehension (Applebee, Langer, Nystrand, & Gamoran, 2003; Lawrence & Snow, in press; Murphy et al., 2009; Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991). Decades-old evidence from Reciprocal Teaching points to the benefits of scaffolded classroom discussion for reading comprehension outcomes (Brown & Palincsar, 1982; Palinscar & Brown, 1984). More recent empirical studies point to classroom conversation as key to the effective modeling and instruction of higher-order comprehension strategies (Beck & McKeown, 2006; Beck, McKeown, & Hamilton, 1997; Beck, McKeown, Sandora, Kucan, & Worthy, 1996; Chapin, O'Connor, & Anderson, 2003; Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008; 2004). Classroom discussion can also promote academic word learning (Snow, Porche, Tabors, & Harris, 2007), especially for older students who do not read well enough to infer the meanings of new words encountered in text (Lawrence & Snow, 2010).

Video: Discussion and Debate and its connection to CCDD

In this video, Catherine O'Connor explains:

discussion can last a short time but typically involves students listening and responding to each other, while trying to understand a text  •  because a discussion is social, it might look like students are off-task; however, a good discussion is an intellectually powerful experience for students  •  academic argument is not a disagreement but an intellectual accomplishment, as students make a claim and support the claim with evidence and reasoning

Also, Claire White explains:

discussion can move beyond the mode of teacher questioning, student responding, then teacher evaluating  •  discussion can be more open-ended and allow kids to interact more deeply both verbally and with the text

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