Diana Hess’s research while affiliated with University of Wisconsin–Madison and other places

Leading productive classroom discussions is difficult, as any one knows who has tried. Teaching future teachers to lead them is doubly difficult — a case of teaching beyond one's own understanding. Here we report our reflection on our efforts to teach beginning teachers to lead discussions. Our method was reflective inquiry, for the central problem we addressed arose from within our teaching, and this is where its solution would have to be worked out. Lisa, one of our student teachers, expressed the problem well: After participating capably in and reflecting upon model discussions that we had led, she said that she had “really no idea how to lead a discussion” herself. Our efforts to teach with discussion were surprisingly inconsequential when it came to teaching for discussion, where the subject matter is discussion itself — its worth, purposes, types, and procedures — and in which case discussion is not a teaching method but a curriculum objective. Against this problem, we critique methods we have used to teach both with and for discussion and present a typology that we developed in order to do both better.