Class Discussion
Nearly all of the class discussion I have seen has taken place in the context of reading a novel together as a class: typically, the teacher would be reading aloud (or the students reading parts, if they were doing Shakespeare) and then would pause every now and then to ask students questions about what they had just read. I saw this done in varying levels of depth and to varying degrees of success. Sometimes, the teacher would only ask leading questions and other types of questions that Christenbury and Lindblom would tell us to avoid (Making the Journey, 344-346), which the teacher would then wind up answering after asking it without giving students much chance to figure it out for themselves; this often resulted in students being less engaged and, I suspect, having lower comprehension of the text. (I've found that this tends to happen more often with Shakespeare, as teachers don't seem to trust that their students can figure it out.) In other classes, the teachers asked open...