Improving Student Discussions in Graduate and Undergraduate Courses: Transforming the Discussion Leader

Student discussions are a common teaching approach in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses because of their benefits to student learning, and to future professional development for natural resources professionals. However, traditional student-led discussions often are ineffective at meeting course and learning objectives and suffer from many common pitfalls, such as dominance by a few vocal students. I present the “student facilitator approach” to student-led discussions that changes the roles of all students in the discussion classroom, particularly the leader, and provides students clear guidelines about preparing for and participating in classroom discussions. A key feature of the approach is the replacement of the student discussion leader (who has control over both discussion content and process) with a student facilitator (who has control over only the discussion process). Using this approach, I found that students responded very positively, that it tended to encourage student participation, and that it created an environment where students took more ownership of the discussion.