Facilitating Inclusive Discussions

In the sections below, we address setup considerations as well as facilitation guidance for improving the inclusivity of discussions in an online course.

Establish Communication Norms

An important procedural skill in facilitating any discussion is setting expectations for the group. As we have discussed throughout the book, online students come from such a variety of backgrounds—and some are coming back to school after time away—so it makes sense to establish those expectations early. Many OSU Ecampus instructors provide a set of guidelines for a productive and effective online discussion. Here are the guidelines from our Inclusive Teaching Online workshop as an example:

• The discussion board is your space to interact with your colleagues related to current topics or responses to your colleague’s statements. It is expected that each individual will participate in a mature and respectful fashion.
• Participate actively in the discussions, having completed the readings and thought about the issues.
• Pay close attention to what your colleagues write in their online comments. Ask clarifying questions, when appropriate. These questions are meant to probe and shed new light, not to minimize or devalue comments.
• Think through and reread your comments before you post them.
• Assume the best of others in the class, and expect the best from them.
• Value the diversity of the class. Recognize and value the experiences, abilities, and knowledge each person brings to class.
• Disagree with ideas, but do not make personal attacks. Do not demean or embarrass others.
• Do not make sexist, racist, homophobic, or victim-blaming comments.
• Be open to being challenged or confronted on your ideas or prejudices.

You might share guidelines in your course syllabus, in introductory course information, or in part of the prompt for the first few discussions. Some online instructors ask students to weigh in on them as a way to ensure that students have agency in co-constructing guidelines about how conversations will proceed during the course, usually through a discussion forum activity early in the course, where guidelines are added to and adjusted. (Chap. 6 includes further guidance and an example of building community agreements.)

Debates, Discussions, and Dialogues

In this section, we examine differences in three key types of online conversations and invite you to reflect on which types you use in your online course as a means to help develop more specific prompts for each.

Whether you designed your online course or not, considering (or reconsidering) how you engage with students in discussion forums requires a good understanding of the purpose of each discussion. Just because an activity uses a discussion forum space does not mean it is necessarily a discussion, and in fact well-designed online courses often use forums for many different kinds of cognitive work across a term. One way to unpack how you might facilitate one of these activities is to reflect on whether it is a debate, discussion, or dialogue.

Table 5.1 outlines the differences between these three categories. As you explore it, notice how power dynamics vary substantially for the instructor (facilitator) and for students, and also how content is treated differently in each case.

Now, consider the following questions as you reflect on forums in your online course:

• Which category (or categories) of conversation best suits your learning outcomes, course content, and discipline?
• Which category (or categories) do your current course “discussion” prompts fall under?
• Are there ways that you might consider reframing your conversations or facilitating them differently based on the characteristics outlined in table 5.1?

One of the advantages to asynchronous online courses is that everyone—or almost everyone—in your class contributes to the conversation since there is rarely (if ever) time in an on-campus class for every student to speak. Yet these online activities tend to put much more emphasis on the student’s initial post rather than their peer responses in much the way that “sharing over listening” is emphasized in the description of discussions in table 5.1. Oftentimes, the instructions for initial posts are much more clearly outlined than those for peer responses, and initial posts are usually weighted more heavily in grading. That (perhaps unintentional) emphasis can diminish the need for students to engage fully and deeply with peers in the remainder of the discussion.

That said, depending on your goals for a particular forum, you might try one or more of the following revisions for its design or facilitation:

• Adjusting the prompt to more explicitly offer meaningful and productive approaches to the peer responses.
• Adjusting the grading of the posts to either favor the peer responses or weight the initial posts and peer responses equally.
• Adjusting your facilitation of a discussion to model the kind of engagement that you want students to have with each other, particularly if you want more of a dialogue-like interaction.

In addition, it is important to be aware of how students’ cultural backgrounds may impact their interactions in an online discussion forum. In chapter 2, we explored individuated and integrated cultural constructs to unpack how aspects of culture and identity influence teaching and learning. These constructs can manifest in online discussions and influence how students see themselves in interacting with others and their instructors, exhibiting different participation behaviors like tending to voice individual ideas or engage in cooperative dialogue and problem-solving. At the same time, students are doing the important work of building their social and professional identities through shared learning and self-knowledge in conversational spaces (Delahunty 2012). You can help students demonstrate or practice demonstrating different conversational behaviors appropriate to the task (and discipline) at hand by being explicit about requirements and norms. Discussion prompts are a great place to employ the Transparent Assessment Design (TAD) framework described in chapter 4.

The Ethics of Mandatory Discussion Participation

In online courses, discussion activities are typically graded to motivate student participation. Some discussions may have lower stakes, such as weekly discussions about content, whereas others may have higher stakes, such as posting a final group project presentation for comment by peers. Even in low-stakes activities such as conversational discussions (of the discussion and dialogue type), instructors may require students to respond to sensitive and controversial topics. You might want to consider whether this blanket requirement for participation is essential to ensuring students meet the learning outcomes for your class, so as to not create unforeseen barriers for students.

In chapter 2, we discussed some of the many and varied experiences and challenges that may impact online students in the classroom. What if one of your students was experiencing stress from housing insecurity at the same time that she was asked to respond to a discussion prompt that triggered a memory of past domestic abuse? This student might carry additional burdens in trying to respond on time, within the parameters of the assignment requirements, and publicly to you and the rest of the class. Heightened pressures and simultaneous recall of trauma could impede her ability to succeed that week in the course, if not beyond.

In an on-campus classroom where there is never enough time to ask for a response from every individual student, it would be perfectly reasonable for this student to attend class, actively listen to others speak to the prompt, and not raise their hand—and this could all count as engaged participation with no penalty for not actively speaking. In online classes that cover potentially sensitive and triggering content, students are not usually presented with an alternative form of participation. Consider: Is this equitable? Instructors might include a course policy where students can reach out about an alternative participation method for discussions that are triggering for them, but even that approach still requires students to disclose (and, to some degree, justify) that they are being triggered.

An alternative approach is to structure discussion grading such that students have to post to a certain number of (graded) discussions across the term, but perhaps not all of them in order to earn full credit in that category. Most learning management systems (LMSs) have the ability to drop a certain number of scores within an assignment category or type. If your course relies heavily on discussions for assessment of course learning outcomes, you could potentially extend this opt-out to initial posts only, not to peer posts, to encourage student engagement in every discussion even if they do not have to share their own initial response.

Discussion Facilitation Roles

The ways in which you facilitate discussions can influence how students participate in those discussions. Too much instructor participation could limit the interaction between students, whereas selective participation with clear structure and rules can promote engagement (An et al. 2009). Research has shown that the number of posts alone has not been found to increase student satisfaction with their online course (Leong 2011); the quality of the contributions is more important than the quantity of instructor posts. That said, there are many ways to effectively facilitate an online discussion, and what you may need to do in any given discussion is fluid—dependent not only on who is in that section of your course but also on the viewpoints being represented and how the conversation unfolds. Because of this dynamic nature, it may be helpful to think about different roles that you can play to productively advance the discussion.

As you review our list of possible discussion roles below, think about which ones you play most often and which ones you may be able to use even if you have not done so already.

• Initial guide: Remember that students may have varying experiences with past online discussions and differing levels of readiness to engage with other students. Students from non-Western cultures may have gone through school looking to the teacher as the prime authority figure and may not have been invited to openly discuss topics with peers; these students may need support in defining their own role and scope of participation in a discussion. Also, any of your students may feel hesitant about engaging in discussions when they (1) do not know others in the class well yet and (2) do not feel like they have expertise on the topic under discussion. Sometimes a sample post from the instructor to help articulate what you are looking for can clarify expectations beyond what you list in the prompt and grading criteria.
• Questioner: We know that humans cannot always see their own blind spots. You can help students to deepen or redirect their thinking by asking follow-up questions about their post or sharing additional information/resources.
• Connector: For large class or discussion groups in particular, discussion threads can become very long between posts and replies. Help students to see where ideas across the discussion are connecting or diverging, which contextualizes and deepens their learning.
• Framer: If your group of students seems to be fairly limited in its range of viewpoints, you might demonstrate support for multiple and other perspectives by posing them in narrative form or linking to additional resources.
• Motivator: Just as you would call out good work in an in-person course, do that in your online course. Students appreciate “public” acknowledgment of their strong efforts and unique contributions; your praise also calls attention to those posts as a model for other students and something that they should be sure to read, even if they are skimming the thread.
• Pilot: You may need to help steer your course’s discussions now and then, either in terms of helping to keep students on track and focused, to manage conflict if it arises, or to help ensure that conversations are headed in a productive direction.

Generally speaking, you may want to lean into roles that students may not often take on. For example, students may engage on a more superficial level about key course topics, so you may need to ask thoughtful follow-up questions to prompt additional or more critical thinking (e.g., play the “devil’s advocate”) to help them examine topics more deeply. If you team teach or have teaching assistants in your course, it is a good idea to explicitly plan out how facilitation in discussions is divided up and what roles are most important to play in particular situations.

Also think about how your role(s) may need to shift over the course of the term. You may need to be an active facilitator early on, when students are just getting to know each other, you, and the course topics. You may be able to adjust your level and type of participation later in the term if discussions are going well.

Finally, while we identified the “motivator” role above as just one of a number of roles you might play in a discussion forum, helpful, constructive feedback to students is a critical part of effective online discussion facilitation; not only does it change the tenor of your presence and of the discussion, but it also does the real teaching work of recognizing or valuing exemplary student work, making important connections, and providing relevant examples such that other students pay attention and learn from them. Resist looking just for faults to correct, and aim to use supportive and encouraging feedback in the same measure that you would use in an on-campus class discussion.

Responding with Equity in Mind

Facilitating discussions effectively also requires taking an equity lens to which students receive instructor replies, questions, and other types of follow-up. One study found that faculty were 94% more likely to respond to a white male student in online discussions than any other student demographic (Baker et al. 2018). Such a finding is of course troubling because it exposes how instructors’ assumptions about student names and implicit biases toward engaging with white male students could affect the learning outcomes and engagement of other students in the class.

Consider using the spreadsheet of student information, such as what we recommended in chapter 4, to keep a tally of who you have replied to on the discussion board and be sure you are responding to different students. You might also track more than just a simple tally to ensure that students are also receiving a mix of positive and constructive replies from you in ways that are visible to their peers. While modeling how to provide constructive criticism or how to express skepticism can be useful facilitation techniques to employ, remember that you can always give private feedback to students when you grade their discussion board posts, too.

The Boundaries of Inclusive Discussion

You may remember from this book’s introduction that one of the reasons that the Inclusive Teaching Online workshop at OSU Ecampus was conceptualized was to help empower instructors to facilitate complex conversations online. Instructors shared that teaching a controversial or sensitive topic online felt challenging compared to in-person teaching, and that the work required to keep discussions productive and to avoid heading in problematic directions was a different set of facilitation skills entirely.

That instructors are concerned about facilitating complex online discussions is not surprising given that hate speech in online spaces is on the rise; in 2023, an estimated 52% of American adults report having been harassed online, and 33% of those adults experienced online harassment within the past 12 months (Center for Technology and Society 2023). The experience of being harassed, witnessing harassment, or even harassing others in other online spaces may have implications for how students engage in online course discussions. Respected publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education have gone so far as to recommend mitigating such issues with controversial topics by holding those discussions in person rather than online (Supiano 2023). But when we need to honor the asynchronous nature of many online course offerings, that approach simply is not possible. We also want to avoid instructors removing complex topics in discussions simply because of the fear that something might go wrong. Rather, we want to provide a framework for instructors to navigate these conversation spaces in asynchronous online classes, while acknowledging that this facilitation can be difficult in any modality but is challenging in unique and acute ways online.

The LARA Method in Online Discussions

LARA,^[1] which stands for listen, affirm, respond, and add information, is a technique used in facilitating conversations among participants in a group where controversy may be involved. Below, we address how slight modifications to the original LARA method can provide a useful framework or protocol for responding to student discussion posts, including when a student posts a comment that you or other students may find inflammatory. While the framework articulates four distinct pieces or phases, they are generally meant to all be included in a single response. Example applications of this method will be shared later in the chapter.

Step 1: Listen

Try to understand what lies at the core of the response: fear, uncertainty, anger, frustration, self-righteousness, entitlement, indignation, disgust, confusion.

• What might a student’s tone tell you?
• What assumptions might their post demonstrate?
• If you know more about this student, that information may help you to answer these questions, but it is still important to listen as you read.

Be sure to listen to what the student is actually saying. In trying to understand what might be behind the comment, we do not want to miss what the student literally said.

Once you have processed the listening step, you will need to demonstrate at the beginning of your response post that you have listened to (and carefully read) the student’s post. (E.g., “Student, I appreciate that you were willing to be vulnerable and write about an example that may have been difficult to share with the group.”)

Step 2: Affirm

This is a step we do not usually think about in a conscious way. Express the connection that you found when you listened, whether it is a feeling, an experience, or a principle/value that you have in common with the other person.

• Affirm whatever you can find in their post that represents what may be, to the student, a reasonable issue or a real fear. If you cannot find anything, there are other ways to affirm, such as drawing out an underlying value that you both share. (E.g., “I can tell by your response here that you feel deeply about your ability to care for your own family.”)
• Ask clarifying questions without patronizing or negative framing, such as “Can you tell me more about ____?”
• The exact words do not matter—the important part is to convey the message that you are not going to be defensive and attack the student, and that you know they have as much integrity as you do.

To be affirming, this step must be genuine rather than “sweet” or “slick” talking. It’s also generally best to use heartfelt, unique language rather than to develop prestructured answers. Note that affirming is not a natural process for many of us, but it gets easier with practice.

Step 3: Respond

We often start with responses to confrontational remarks. Instead, demonstrate listening and affirmation in your post before you respond.

Debaters and politicians (and sometimes the rest of us) often avoid the topic that was raised and talk about a different topic instead in order to stay in control of the situation.

• With LARA, respond to the issue the person raised.
• If you do not know the answers, say so—it is perfectly okay to admit when you do not know something. Refer students to other sources if you know some, or tell them you will find out the answer if that seems appropriate.

Sometimes the student does not really want to hear new information but is simply trying to share their feelings. In those cases, a response might come in a subtler form that acknowledges that the student has been heard.

Also, consider that personal insights and experiences can often be more meaningful and impactful in a way that abstract facts cannot.

Step 4: Add Information

This step gives you a chance to share any additional, pertinent information.

• It may help the student and/or the rest of the class to consider the issue in a new light or to redirect the discussion in a more positive direction.
• This is a good time to state whatever facts are relevant to the issue the student raised. This may involve correcting any mistaken facts they mentioned; you can offer credible facts at this point because now you have made a personal connection, and so that student is probably more open to hearing your facts than they would have been if you had started with critiques first.
• This is also an opportunity to offer additional resources (articles, organizations, people—preferably as links so they are easily accessible) or to add a personal anecdote.

Additional Considerations with LARA

In the case of an inflammatory student post, remember that your reply post serves both as a response to that individual student and as a signaling mechanism to the rest of the class about how you will handle the situation. Determine how long the post has been available and whether other students have already replied (which might require additional situation management) or whether this post has sat with no peer responses (which might suggest that some students were affected by this post, were unsure about how to respond, or ignored it entirely). The content and tone of your LARA-structured response may need to be adjusted based on these considerations.

If the student post is especially problematic, you may need to pursue further follow-up beyond a LARA-based reply. We will discuss additional actions in more detail below.

Comfort, Risk, and Danger

In the Social Justice Education Initiative (SJEI) workshops at Oregon State University, the program director, Jane Waite, introduces a three-part concept of Comfort, Risk, and Danger Zones, originally based on a protocol from the National School Reform Faculty database. These three categories are useful as a reference for how to navigate rude, inflammatory, and biased posts from students as well as for navigating our own feelings that may arise about those posts.

• Comfort Zone: A place where we feel at ease, with no tension, have a good grip on the topic, like to hear from others about the topic, and know how to navigate occasional rough spots with ease. It is also a place to retreat to from the Danger Zone. For example, one of your Danger Zone aspects may be when people start disagreeing with passion and even disrespect. You might find that when that happens, you retreat into your Comfort aspect of listening and not intervening, or even find a way to divert the conversation to a topic that is in your Comfort Zone.
• Risk Zone: This is the most fertile place for learning. It is where most people are willing to take some risks and not know everything or sometimes nothing at all, but it is where they want to learn and will take the risks necessary to do so. The Risk Zone is where people open up to others with curiosity and interest, and where they will consider options or ideas they have not previously considered.
• Danger Zone: Generally it is not a good idea to work from either your own Danger Zone or anyone else’s. It is an area so full of defenses, fears, red lights, desire for escape, and the like that it is hard to accomplish anything. The best way to work when you find yourself there is to own that it is a Danger Zone and work on some strategies to move into the Risk Zone (either on your own or with colleagues) (Wentworth 2001).

Consider where your own course discussion topics are for you. Are they all in the Safety Zone? Are any in the Risk Zone? Could any cause students to tip into the Danger Zone? Remember, too, that a topic that is comfortable for you to converse about—perhaps because you are an expert and have worked on it for many years—may not be comfortable for your students. Discussions in the Risk Zone, as the definition above notes, are great places to “stretch” participants for learning, but if there is a possibility that a discussion could tip into the Danger Zone for either you or your students, you may want to consider how to mitigate the pressures that come up by adding especially careful directions, referencing policies about classroom communication and particularly attentive facilitation (especially in discussions).

When to Engage Additional Resources

Our adaptation of the LARA method provides a framework for responses to all kinds of student posts, from innocuous to provocative, but it is important to define your boundaries around what is permitted in your classroom discussion and what is not. Identifying this line is a complex balancing act of our notions of freedom of speech and our need to ensure that the dignity, humanity, and worth of everyone in the classroom is acknowledged (even when conversations veer into the Risk Zone). Knowing more about where to draw that line will help you to feel more prepared to facilitate your online discussions.

If a student’s post is pushing the boundaries that you set out in the course, seek a second opinion. As an instructional faculty member, it is an important skill to know when you should no longer handle an issue entirely on your own and when you need to consult with someone else to determine the next step. A trusted colleague in your department may be able to offer a second opinion, and you are also encouraged to contact your supervisor and talk through recommendations for next steps. If you are responding to this student on the discussion forum, using the LARA method to continue to engage that student and ultimately provide redirection or an alternative perspective will help you avoid alienating that individual student from the group, support that student’s progress as a critical thinker, and signal to the other students in the class what a compassionate but firm response looks like in a moment of uncertainty or controversy. Modeling this type of response can be a great learning opportunity for your students, particularly at a time when students do not have good models of civilized, productive discussion in the media. Alternatively, this may be a situation where you might attempt to take a longer conversation with that student out of the discussion board and into email, a phone call, or a web conference.

If a student’s post blatantly violates the discussion and communication norms of your course, engage the resources available to you at your institution. Your supervisor or department chair can be a good first resource. At a minimum, you will need to intervene in the course discussion to deescalate the conversation, but you may also need to take additional action. Your institution may also have a formal process for addressing incidents of bias or discrimination. Depending on your institution’s LMS settings, you also may have the ability to delete the post from the discussion thread if needed, but you will want to screenshot and document the post before you delete it. Consider how to support others in the class who may have seen this post before it was removed, within the discussion board itself, as an announcement, or by checking in with students individually.

Further Considerations for Problematic Student Posts

Sometimes when reading a student post, you may find yourself in the Danger Zone. How do you get yourself back to the Risk Zone before you respond? You might need to step away momentarily, and the asynchronous online classroom affords you that opportunity. As we mentioned above, it is also a good idea to lean on a trusted colleague, your supervisor, or another member of the support staff at your institution to help you determine if the student’s post rises to the level of a bias incident and should be handled through an established institutional process.

When you and other students are not pushed into the Danger Zone but you find yourself in a space of strong disagreement with ideas that a student may be expressing, we would encourage you to reflect critically about how you respond to these students to support open dialogue. Instructors at many academic institutions tend toward ideas coded as being liberal, so students who hold more conservative ideas (especially politically) sometimes report that they feel isolated at their institutions or choose not to speak up in discussions (Binder and Wood 2011; Johnson 2019). In scenarios involving strong disagreement, using the adapted LARA method provides you with a framework for continuing to build a relationship with your students by demonstrating active listening, which will in turn allow you to present alternate perspectives that they can explore in a more open-minded way.

Scenario: How Would You Respond?

Depending on the types and content within the courses that you teach, you may be more or less likely to encounter a severely problematic student discussion post. Instructors whose teaching involves ethical quandaries, topics of social justice, or other sensitive content may need to employ the adapted LARA method with some frequency. Conversely, instructors who teach math or lab science courses may not be discussing tough topics with students and may not need to use the adapted LARA method in discussions often. Note, however, that LARA can be used in all kinds of interactions with students where tension might be heightened—including course concerns or grade disputes—as well as in common contexts like providing feedback on student work.

The adapted LARA method takes practice to apply, and whether you are likely to need it in regular discussion forums with students or not, it can be helpful to work through a scenario so that you better understand how you might use it should you ever need it—also using the tools of assessing danger, risk, and comfort in ethical discussions. Below, we offer a sample student post that would be challenging to respond to and where LARA can help frame a productive reply. This post has been altered to protect student, instructor, and course anonymity but is based on a real example from an online course. The exercise below can be done on your own but is a fantastic springboard for discussion if you have an opportunity to talk it through with colleagues.

The Student Case

You are teaching a course on public health, and one of the modules asks students to consider what role community education programs could play in reducing health disparities related to race or ethnicity. You know from past experience that students sometimes struggle with fluently articulating their thoughts on this topic and pulling in the course resources for that week, so you have the best intentions of checking in on the discussion board each day while students are completing the activity (Monday through Thursday). But Monday and Tuesday that week are booked with meetings, and so you do not actually take a look at the discussion forum posts until Wednesday morning.

The first few student posts are engaging and insightful. Students are contributing helpful examples and teasing out some of the nuances in peer response posts. Then, you see a post in the middle of the thread: it has no student responses, and it was posted on Monday at 10:23 p.m. The post reads as follows:

At the end of the day, the problem of racial minority groups being disproportionately affected by bad health outcomes in this country is based in a lack of education and too many single-parent households. The majority of Black, Latino, and Native American births are to women who are unmarried. The CDC report cited below says that households ran by a single parent are going to have fewer financial resources and therefore will not be able to afford better health resources. People in these lower tiers of socioeconomics are also more likely to drop out of school. Education seems to predict and determine socioeconomic status as well as single-mother status. Those who have not completed basic education are more likely to become teen moms and so they perpetuate the cycle of poverty that keeps people from accessing better healthcare during their lifetime. Healthcare includes sexual health, and children of single mothers are more likely to not get education on STDs, are more likely to get an STD, and are more likely to have less in the way of financial resources to treat that medical condition. Not only that, but children living with mothers who are living with men that are not their biological fathers are 33 times more likely to be abused, which usually leads to psychological trauma as well as bodily harm. A mother who makes the choice to have multiple men around in the house adds to those chances for abuse. This then leads to lasting health concerns for the minority children. The issues of teen pregnancies and single moms must be addressed to ensure full-time enrollment in schools and the other piece that must happen at the same time is encouraging family planning to create stable homes with parents who have more money, and these issues are most significant for minority groups. For this improvement to happen, there needs to be a big cultural shift in family planning for these groups but also just in general. Increasing education is pointless unless the target audience is showing up. To sum up, promoting nuclear families must be the priority before any change or addition to education will have a chance of making a difference.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5333a1.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/std/stats18/minorities.htm

https://cis.org/Camarota/Births-Unmarried-Mothers-Nativity-and-Education

https://www.drphil.com/advice/parenting-in-the-real-world-shocking-statistics/

Consider what information from this post you are taking into account and how you are processing it; consider also what additional context about the student and their work in the course you would want to reflect on if this was really your course and your student. If part of your plan involves responding to the student—on the discussion thread and/or in a private message—this would be a good place to try out the adapted LARA method.

Sample Instructor Responses

Instructors who have completed the Inclusive Teaching Online workshop through OSU Ecampus have worked through this scenario in a small-group discussion. With their permission, we share some of their sample responses below to provide a sense of the breadth of possible responses and how different approaches could be effective. As you read through these responses, consider the different ways these educators are listening, affirming, responding, and adding information.