In response to our first Teach@CUNY call of the semester, four CUNY instructors—from BMCC, City Tech, and the Graduate Center—wrote to share some of the strategies they’ve used to generate and sustain thoughtful, inclusive, and productive discussions in their classrooms.  We’ll be publishing their posts this week, and we invite readers to contribute their own thoughts, advice, or past experiences as a comment.

In the meantime, we also wanted to share one additional strategy from GC alum Janine Utell—now an Associate Professor of English at Widener University—who wrote a piece for Inside Higher Ed about her decision to frame class discussion as peer review (but “in a good way”!)  As she describes it,  this approach serves two purposes: helping her and her students “see the value of class discussion, which can feel a bit amorphous” and allowing them to “evaluate the material they have generated.”