What Is It?
Have you ever wanted your students to take the lead in an online discussion? Maybe you teach graduate level classes, train teachers, or want to build leadership and management skills for undergraduates. By designating some of your students as discussion facilitators, you empower them to become mediators, teach them to ask probing questions, and create discussions in which all students feel more invested.
Why Use Student Facilitation?
- Some studies suggest that student facilitation leads to greater student satisfaction as well as longer and more numerous posts.
- When students facilitate discussions, they gain skills they might use as professors, teachers, or leaders in the workplace.
- When students manage the discussion, you are freed up to address misconceptions and to participate in the discussion yourself.
Watch Our 40-minute Webinar on Student Facilitation
How to Enable Student Facilitators in Harmonize
- Create a graded Harmonize discussion.
- Set up student facilitators.
- Grade your discussion (see Grading in Canvas or Grading in Blackboard, Brightspace, or Moodle).
Pro Tip: Consider grading the facilitators only on their facilitation, since they might not be able to both facilitate and participate in the discussion.
General Tips and Strategies
Create a starter discussion establishing norms/guidelines.
Consider having a discussion during the first week or two of class where students can establish guidelines for future discussions. Invite students to share what they do and don’t like about online discussions and what expectations they have for their classmates. What are the responsibilities of participants during a discussion? Of facilitators? What does civil discourse look like, and how can students disagree respectfully? You could even collaborate to design a rubric for use on future discussions.
Model being the facilitator for a few weeks.
Don’t just throw your students into the deep end. Spend a couple of weeks facilitating discussions and modeling what good facilitation looks like. This is a great time to get “meta”: explain why you’re doing what you’re doing. For example: “I posted this comment and @ed so-and-so in order to synthesize different perspectives and make sure so-and-so saw this other comment relating to hers.”
Pro Tip: You can use this strategy during your starter discussion where you’re establishing norms and guidelines.
Outline roles and responsibilities of facilitators.
Once you’ve decided–possibly with help from your students!–what constitutes good student facilitation, you’ll need to communicate this to the student facilitators. Harmonize provides separate instructions to student facilitators, and you can use our pre-loaded instructions or change them. If you’re not using Harmonize, provide separate instructions to facilitators so they understand their roles and responsibilities. What kinds of questions should they be asking? Should they be making connections between different comments? Prompting deeper engagement? You might also consider assigning students to a particular stage of the discussion (see “Consider three stages” below).
Consider three stages: kick-off, flow, and closing.
Discussions have different stages, and student facilitators can be responsible for one or more of them. In her blogpost for Harmonize, Alyssa Wise describes these stages as “kick-off,” “flow,” and “closing.” Facilitators might “kick-off” the discussion by posting a presentation or by sharing discussion questions. Alternatively, facilitators might aid the “flow” of a discussion by asking probing questions, making connections between posts, or asking for alternative views. At the end, facilitators can “close” the discussion by synthesizing and summarizing what has occurred.
Pro Tip: Undergraduate students might find it easier to handle “flow” and “closing.” Successful “kick-off” often requires content mastery.
Have students sign up (student choice!).
Create a spreadsheet or use a free sign up service so your students can choose which week they’re facilitating. Some students will be more interested in certain topics than others, and some students might have weeks where they’re too busy for facilitation.
Remember: facilitators don’t have to be content experts.
It’s common to ask student facilitators to be both content experts and discussion facilitators. This makes sense for students who are preparing to become professors or teachers. But one downside is that other students might come unprepared and/or hold back during discussions. Try making students responsible for facilitation without requiring content mastery. This gives them a chance to focus on their facilitation skills and allows everyone to participate fully in the discussion.
Pro Tip: You can reduce the pressure to be a content expert by handling the “kick-off” yourself and having your student facilitators handle “flow” and “closing.”
Become a participant.
You might be wondering, “What exactly am I supposed to be doing if my students are facilitating everything?” Consider becoming a participant in the discussion, reacting to posts and replying as a student might. Just be careful: your comments might carry more weight than those of actual students, and you don’t want to dampen the organic discussion that’s happening.
Let them choose a facilitation strategy.
If your students have had some pedagogical training–which might be the case for future teachers and professors–consider letting them choose their own facilitation strategy. Some case studies with pre-service teachers have shown good results when teachers-in-training had the opportunity to test out different strategies. This also allows your students to find their voice as teachers.
Further Reading
- “Best Practices for Student-Led Discussions” by Alyssa Wise
- “Student‐led facilitation strategies in online discussions” by Evrim Baran and Ana-Paula Correia
- “Using Peer Teams to Lead Online Discussions” by Liam Rourké and Terry Anderson
- “Improving Student Discussions in Graduate and Undergraduate Courses: Transforming the Discussion Leader” by Patricia A. Soranno