Scaffolding Class Discussion with Canvas

A perennial challenge of teaching seminar-style classes is students’ hesitation to engage in discussion. One can often count on a few students who regularly participate to eventually respond to a question or prompt, but this does not always lead to a dynamic discussion, and we of course want all students to be actively engaged during the course of a class period. The sociologist Jay Howard calls this common classroom norm “the consolidation of responsibility" (Howard, 2015).  In this column, I will describe strategies for using homework assignments to catalyze dynamic seminar-style class sessions based on assigned reading or viewing (such as films or other videos) aimed at mitigating the consolidation of responsibility and related challenges. As Canvas is the Learning Management System (LMS) used to create course websites at the University of Chicago, where I teach, I will be referring to this platform’s specific features. The primary goal of these assignments is to generate student-centered discussions that promote active learning, while still reflecting the instructor’s learning goals and topics. A great deal of research has shown that students have better learning outcomes when they are actively engaged in their learning process (see Kozanitis & Nenciovici, 2022; Martinez & Gomez, 2024; Freeman et al., 2014).  Utilizing questions and comments students submit for homework during the following class session is one form of active learning that facilitates students’ agency in a course. Interpreting and selectively incorporating students’ comments and questions on homework to shape class discussion is the ultimate goal of the assignments I describe below. 

The Language Learning Context: Engaging Students During Class Time 

Most of the practices and goals of my pedagogical approach are rooted in the context of language learning. In the German Language Program at the University of Chicago, the “flipped classroom” model was implemented under the direction of Dr. Catherine Baumann by the early 2000s. This approach may be (rather reductively) summarized as follows: even in the first year of language study, grammatical concepts and vocabulary are introduced for homework. Class time is best employed putting this new material to use in activities that model authentic use of the language, such as transactions from daily life or conversation. In other words, lectures on the grammatical features of the language are not an effective use of class time. Rather, a key measure of successful usage of class time is the amount of time the students are speaking the target language. The instructor’s role in this scenario is to answer any questions and facilitate discussion and other activities such as partner or group work. Beginning at the end of the first year of German language instruction at UChicago, students work with assigned reading or viewing, moving from working with a textbook to utilizing material that was not created for instructional purposes, also known in the field of language teaching as “authentic material.” By the third year of language instruction, which I supervise, the majority of class time is spent in seminar-style discussion of assigned material, as we approach the format of a college-level seminar conducted in German. Here I will elaborate on structured discussions that take place in the target language and leave out activities that focus more specifically on polishing grammatical acuity in German. I have utilized the types of assignments I will detail below in English-language seminars as well as advanced German-language classes and offer them as potentially productive in seminar-style courses in a broad range of fields. 

Short Answer Questions: Checking for Comprehension 

The first type of assignment that I would like to describe might seem pedestrian at first glance but has proven essential at all levels of my teaching: the comprehension check. Students in the same class of our German language program have the same nominal grasp of the target language, as established by a placement test or completion of another course at UChicago. However, students’ language proficiency can vary widely when it comes to the four skills we put to use in our language courses: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. When it comes to reading a text, some students might possess the linguistic and cultural knowledge to read without resources and come to class ready to engage at the level of the instructor’s activities. Other students spend a little or perhaps quite a lot of time looking up specific words in a dictionary or perhaps looking up concepts or historical events in a resource like Wikipedia. In light of these variations, I employ short answer questions to guide reading or viewing of assigned materials in addition to covering the broader outlines of the material. 

I use a basic Canvas assignment for this type of homework, in which a link to the reading or viewing and my questions are listed in the header and students may type their answers into a text box. As students new to Canvas can sometimes find it hard to navigate, I always put assigned reading or viewing into a Canvas assignment with a deadline listed, as this reliably shows up on students’ Canvas homepage. 

In class, I review these short answer questions. Firstly, this helps with a process known in language teaching as “re-activation,” that is recalling the vocabulary and grammatical structures necessary for the activity at hand, in this case a discussion. I think that re-activation is a useful concept for most seminar-style discussions, in the sense that it helps students return to the salient details of course topics in what might be a day packed with other classes, work, and so on. Secondly, as recent scholarship has suggested, “warm calling” rather than cold calling on students can productively get a discussion going in which everyone participates (see Eaton et al., 2023). In this case, as preparing these questions was a clear requirement for that day’s class, any student, including those normally shy about speaking up, can be called on to answer a question from the homework. Students can get used to sharing their answers in a situation where they definitely have already thought out an answer. Hopefully, as the discussion moves past the questions introduced for homework, you might still call on any student in the class. 

Short answer questions are a method of assessment that has been elaborated at length in the context of language learning by the Office of Language Assessment (OLA) at the University of Chicago. Based on the research-backed specifications of the OLA, I have designed short answer questions for reading tasks on tests at three different levels of German language competency. At their most complex, a short answer question might, for example, ask that a scholarly term be explained in the context of one or several paragraphs of a text. This latter question is meant to demonstrate comprehension of the excerpted text in its entirety, supported by general familiarity with a broader field. Such a question might be appropriate to prepare for a class discussion of a theoretical nature. More often for my Canvas assignments that are meant as comprehension checks, I am focused on directing novice students to specific parts of the assigned material to which we will return in person. For example, in one short answer question, I might ask students to describe in their own words the results of a survey reported in minute 3 of an 8-minute news video. In class, we might further discuss the implications of the results of this survey. I usually have 5-8 short answer questions in an assignment. 

Structuring Canvas Discussions with Roles 

A common challenge that I experience in teaching is the feeling that I haven’t managed to give a particular topic or text on the course syllabus its due. For example, one can spend a whole class session discussing what exactly it is that a given text is attempting to express, without even moving on to the implications of these statements for us, the audience of the text. Similarly, I have described above the task of short answer questions, but this was a clearly orchestrated attempt by the instructor to address specific aspects of a text or other material. What if we want our students to be able to summarize this material, perhaps even to people outside of our class? 

Summarizing is a task which I have sometimes made an assignment in itself. As you can imagine, if you ask a class of 12 students to write a summary of a 20-page excerpt of a text they were assigned to read, while there will likely be some overlap, they might come up with different versions of the main ideas and supporting details. I have created an assignment formatted as a Canvas Discussion in which students are required to write a summary and post it, but they can only see their fellow students’ posts once they submit their own. This is an assignment in which basic comprehension may be assessed. It also begins to show students the concept of paragraph-level cohesion. One student might post a summary which might be described as a “string of sentences.” If one re-ordered the sentences there would be little lost in this summary. Paragraph-level cohesion suggestions something like a topic sentence with supporting evidence. These kinds of distinctions might be offered as feedback on the assignment in private comments to each student. In class, one might explore the ways in which different students make meaning of the text as a whole at the level of summary. 

More often, I create Canvas Discussion assignments with specific roles for specific students. In this assignment type, one student is assigned the role of writing a summary. Some of the other students must post clarificatory questions, i.e. something they did not understand. The remaining students are required to post a discussion question. All students answer a question in the forum in addition to the aforementioned roles. I assign students these roles because I find that students enjoy posting discussion questions and then discussing them in class. Without explicit instructions to do so, students do not often ask clarificatory questions, though these are really helpful in ensuring everyone is on the same page when we start in-class discussion. I address the summary and these clarificatory questions in class and then move on to selected discussion questions. Sometimes no one has answered the discussion questions I posed, and I accept that they were less interesting than those posted by the students. Often students post questions that are similar but not the same as what I was hoping to discuss, and the alternate phrasing or focus the students have introduced leads to productive discussion. The asynchronous discussion, in addition to the work we do in class, helps alleviate the feeling that we didn’t have enough time for specific course material. I also often point students back to discussion forums for topics for final papers. I add the questions I thought most pertinent to addressing course goals to these forums as soon as the assignment is published. This means that even the first student to complete the assignment has something to react to and thereby complete the assignment. All students review and consider my input, even if they choose not to engage with it. 

Conclusion 

The ultimate payoff of assigning homework for each and every session of a seminar is ensuring students actively engage with assigned material and providing the instructor the option to preview students’ reactions and glean what was appealing and what was alienating (Tanner, 2023). I have described methods to ensure that students have processed information conveyed to them in assigned reading or viewing. Each of my advanced seminars in the German language program also supports students in developing the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to state their own opinions on the topics of the course and support them with evidence. Stating opinions related to topics of public interest and supporting them is part of the research-backed criteria of language proficiency at the advanced level that I use to establish appropriate assignments and activities for language courses at this level.  In requiring students to contribute to our class discussion online and in-person, students are actively finding the salient vocabulary and structures of persuasive speech, as well as the specialist background knowledge to formulate and defend an opinion. They are thereby fulfilling course objectives and my conception of some of the larger aims of liberal arts education as a whole. 

References

Eaton, R. I., Hunsaker, S. V., & Moon, B. S. (2023). Improving learning and mental health in the college classroom. West Virginia University Press.

Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and Mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410–8415. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111 

Howard, J. (2015). Discussion in the College Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kozanitis, A., & Nenciovici, L. (2022). Effect of active learning versus traditional lecturing on the learning achievement of college students in Humanities and Social Sciences: A meta-analysis. Higher Education, 86(6), 1377–1394. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00977-8 

Martinez, M. E., & Gomez, V. (2024). The importance of social-emotional learning in schools. Acta Pedagogia Asiana, 3(2), 101–112. https://doi.org/10.53623/apga.v3i2.468 

Tanner, K. D. (2017). Structure matters: Twenty-one teaching strategies to promote student engagement and cultivate classroom equity. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 12(3), 322–331. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.13-06-0115