August 29, 2023

Discussion skills are high-stakes, teachable, and uniquely human: Why don’t we explicitly teach them in school today? 

A great discussion is a human experience. You think deeply, express yourself intentionally, abide by nuances of others’ reactions, and build relationships in the process. Often, a discussion is dialectical—someone expresses a thesis, someone else an antithesis, and then a synthesis or compromise emerges; made possible because of that contrast in perspectives (and the human courage it took to articulate and engage them). A great discussion is a generative, cognitive, social, and emotional experience all at once. 

The ability to engage in a discussion like this is a uniquely human skill. Monkeys are sentient—they have feelings and self-awareness—but they lack language as sophisticated as humans. AI has seemingly infinite language but is not sentient. AI tools like ChatGPT are trained to recognize and mimic human emotion but they will never have the sensory capacity to read body language or hear shifts in the tone of your voice (prosody).

Discussion is how the world works: discussion leads to decision-making in schools, government, business, medicine, law, domestic life, and the list goes on. Talking and listening to each other is how we trust, love, question, and come to know each other. These skills are at the core of society, certainly, but also individual well-being and a sense of connection. 

And yet, as we know too well: discussion is a dying art in today’s world. At this point, the headlines are familiar: civility wanes; polarity waxes. Screentime and algorithms tighten our worldview, serving up content to reinforce—rather than challenge—our preferences and opinions. AI makes it so we are less dependent on each other for information, short-circuiting opportunities for developing relationships in the process of data-gathering. Ideological perfectionism abounds: compromise and synthesis have become branded as signs of individual weakness rather than collective strength. The signs of trouble? It’s not just eye-watering polarity destabilizing the government. Adults are lonely; adolescents are sad; and young kids are rulebreaking at astonishing rates. 

Teaching kids how to have discussions must be a priority in schools today—their health and our future society depend on it. Short-term: Kids need to learn how to self-regulate, self-express, and listen to each other—even when they disagree or have different experiences. Researchers are still working to pinpoint which social skills kids develop through on-screen communication—during video games, on social media and messaging platforms, for example—but the bottom line is that there is no way that communicating through a screen exposes students to the deeply human experience of true discussion. In my work, we interview thousands of middle and high school students about their communication patterns— and we constantly hear replies like “Well if I have something hard to say, I wait and do it later, over text. I don’t want to put [my friend] on the spot.” What teens see as giving each other privacy actually robs both parties of that “deeply human” part of discussion: the authenticity and intimacy, of having—and your relationship surviving!—a challenging, live conversation. We also hear “Like in a store if the cashier talks to me I look at my feet and don’t know what to say.” These experiences matter in terms of helping students build better relationships and make meaning of the complex world in which they’re growing up. Equally important? Flash forward twenty years: it’s not an exaggeration to say that our shared future will well depend on Gen-Z’s communication skills. After all, a thoughtful conversation among LLM programmers is and will continue to be our very best defense against dark uses of AI. Thoughtful discourse among elected officials about other big issues—the environment, healthcare, global politics—will affect us all. In an uncertain, rapidly changing world, discussion skills are an insurance policy!

But wait: Aren’t discussion skills taught in schools today? No. Sure, many schools ask students to “have discussions” (find me an independent school viewbook that doesn’t show students talking to each other around a Harkness table or a literature syllabus that doesn’t mention discussion grades!). But very, very few schools explicitly teach and assess discussion skills with the specificity and rigor with which we approach other skills and subjects. Discussion is often lumped in with a “participation grade” in English class or assessed at the group level in order to incentivize collaboration and sidestep equity concerns (“How do I not penalize introverts?”). Sometimes it’s relegated to advisory or homeroom as a small part of a SEL curriculum. Instruction in discussion skills is squishy at best. Why?

Teachers don’t have the tools to break the art of discussion into teachable, assessable, transferable skills for a generation of kids who would rather text than talk. Historically, in a world that depended mostly on face-to-face communication, students showed up at school with foundational conversation skills; they didn’t need to be explicitly taught!  The Common Core speaking and listening standards are an artifact of that outlook: Sure, there are standards, but these skills aren’t assessed on state tests. Teachers are not given skills-based curricula for teaching, practicing, and assessing these skills; they are learned implicitly, as part of content standards. In independent schools, there’s often a cultural agreement that discussion-based learning is a core part of the educational experience, but there is no taxonomy, no common language across classrooms, and no evidence-based methods for assessment where student skills are tracked over time. Often, discussion is used as a learning activity—a way to process content—rather than approached as a content-agnostic set of learning objectives. Every teacher reinvents the wheel; students perform accordingly (e.g. Oh, in Mrs. X’s class, you just have to ‘make space for someone else’s voice,’ like ‘Sarah, you haven’t talked yet, do you have something to say?’ and you’ll get an ‘A’) and move on to the next grade level (although often, the discussion expectations don’t increase in difficulty).

This approach robs students of the opportunity to become experts in discussion. If there’s no shared language and no way of making growth visible, students can’t name, practice, and truly master discussion skills over time. Common language allows students to reflect specifically on discussions—not just do them—and can position teachers as coaches, able to provide precise, skills-based feedback the way an athletic coach might (e.g. “I wish I heard your voice more often!” becomes: “I appreciated your non-verbal communication as your head-nodding showed agreement; next time, speaking once is the goal; try writing notes ahead of time so you know what you want to say.”). At a group level, common language also unlocks reflection on discussion dynamics—a second-order skill that we certainly want tomorrow’s leaders to have! This is when students move from thinking only about their own performance to analyzing the group-level patterns, what MIT Professor Sandy Pentland calls the “social physics” of how ideas are generated and spread. 

This awareness of discussion as an art, a science, and above all a deeply human experience should be a graduation requirement for students today. The world would be a safer, happier, more human(e) place for it.

You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Liza Garonzik for Intrepid Ed News.