Teaching Strategies: Effective Discussion Leading While
lecturing is a fast and direct way to communicate a body of
knowledge, discussion encourages students to discover solutions
for themselves and to develop their critical thinking abilities.
They learn how to generate ideas, consider relevant issues,
evaluate solutions, and consider the implications of these
solutions. Thus, although discussion is not as efficient as
lecture in conveying facts, it helps students learn how to think
better and more clearly about the facts that they should learn
from their reading and their lectures. Leading a discussion,
however, offers its own set of challenges: participants can
spend too much time exploring small, sometimes irrelevant
issues, forget that they are progressing toward an identifiable
goal, and become bored. The leader must guide the conversation
carefully without stifling creativity and students' initiative
and without surrendering to some students' desire for answers
that they can write down and memorize. He