A Dynamic and Thriving Society 

Allow me to explain what robust societies mean. Robust societies are healthy, strong and thriving. They are also dynamic, not static and they are not perfect, because no societies are. But they are striving and yearning to be better. Robust societies require people to be all in. They cannot be created or nurtured by just a few people.  

While there is an intrinsic connection between schooling and robust societies, it’s important to focus on everybody in our society. Young people from the wee little ones in early childhood education to older students in technical institutes and universities are important to the creation of robust societies, as are their elders. But just as their elders were taught and shaped and nurtured by schools, so too must schooling be principally concerned with not what we are but with what we will become. 

There are many ways that schooling can help create robust societies. But today, I’m going to argue for a particular approach to schooling that helps young people work on one very important question: How should we live together? 

Critical Yet Thoughtful Discussions about the Society 

I want you to notice that the question is perennial. It’s impossible to imagine a time when societies don’t have to answer the question, because societies by definition, are dynamic. I want you to notice that the question is broad and it’s overarching. It’s a mega question of sorts. It’s deliberative, signalled by the word “should” and it’s not individualistic – notice the words “we” and “together”.  

But I imagine you are a bit perplexed because as teachers, you know, that some questions are simply more discussable than others. And this question “How should we live together” doesn’t seem like it would make for a sure-fire lesson plan and you’re right. It would not, because it is too broad. It lacks the precision and focus that would enable students to know what they’re actually supposed to be talking about. 

But consider these questions from the new Singapore social studies curriculum that will be released in August: Is harmony achievable? 

From the remarkable new book on Curriculum for Justice and Harmony by my friends and colleagues Professors Li-Ching Ho and Keith Barton: How can hunger be prevented and alleviated? From the horrifying massacre of 19 children and teachers in Texas last Friday: Should the United States adopt stricter gun control laws? While the topics and types of these questions are quite different from one another, they’re all examples of the larger overarching question of “how we should live together?” 

Teaching students the knowledge, the skills, and dispositions to engage in thoughtful discussion and deliberation of questions such as these can help ensure that students will be a crucial part of creating the robust societies we should want and need. Allow me to begin with a brief roadmap of the argument I’m going to make today. 

Encouraging Classroom Talk 

First, classroom talk is critical and in particular, discussion and deliberation. Second, a focus on important questions and issues about topics that are meaningful and important needs to be at the heart of what students talk about.  

Then I’ll turn to a very challenging decision that teachers have to make whether to teach a question or an issue as “open” or as “settled”. “Open” means that we assume that there are multiple and competing right answers and “settled” means that there is a particular answer that we want students to build and believe. 

There are many reasons why this is challenging but perhaps the most important is that issues tip over time; meaning that they change from open to settled and from settled to open and it’s often very hard for schools and for teachers, to decide whether to be on the front edge or on the back edge of the tip. 

In many classrooms, there’s a lot of talk in pairs and in small groups for good reason because many voices mean more brains are working on a problem, and pairs and small groups will demand participation of both talking and listening. Discussions that focus on both high-quality talk and broadly inclusive talk have the potential to not only teach students things that only discussion can teach, but to also advance diversity of thought and participation, equity and inclusion. 

Discussion Versus Deliberation 

Discussion is focused inquiry through speaking and listening that is purposeful, broadly collaborative and that leads to understanding through analysis of different perspectives. Now, let’s turn to what deliberation means. Again, like discussion, it is contested. But Latin can help us here. The noun “deliberation” comes from a Latin word meaning to weigh or more broadly to weigh and examine. My great teacher and friend Walter Parker framed deliberation as discussion with an eye toward decision making; a “we” must make a decision about what should be done. 

As a general rule of thumb, if the word “should” is in a question, it most likely calls for deliberation and not discussion. 

So, what do we know about what students learn from discussion and deliberation? I like to characterize the distinction between teaching with discussion and deliberation, and teaching for discussion and deliberation. 

Teaching with quite simply means that you’re using discussion and deliberation as a vehicle, as a pedagogical tool, in order to teach students important content information, in order to help them consider multiple perspectives, in order for them to build the skill and the disposition of intellectual charity, in order to help them build empathy and in order to help them think and to weigh and to balance. 

Teaching for discussion, on the other hand, is designed to help young people improve their ability to participate effectively in discussions and deliberations. So, in teaching for, we want students to learn how to talk with clarity and with succinctness, we want them to learn what good examples are, we want them to learn how to ask questions and most significantly we want them to learn how to listen. 

The Key to High Quality Classroom 

So, in a nutshell, here’s what we learned in high quality classrooms with discussions of open controversial issues that happened quite frequently: Students learned how to value multiple perspectives in a way they reported not learning in other classes. They learned how to ask questions of their peers and how to listen thoughtfully to their peers’ answers. They learned important content and most importantly they learned that there was a “we” to decision making. 

One student that we interviewed four years after he graduated from high school talked about the fact that his teacher had taught him how important it was to ensure that when decisions are being made – especially critical decisions – that we thoughtfully take into account the perspectives of many different people; and he talked about how that affected him at the University and he talked about how that affected him as a citizen, that he was more likely to pay attention to the news, that he was more likely to vote, and we found those effects across literally hundreds of students.  

So, what did that teach me? It taught me that in classrooms with high quality discussion and deliberation, we are actually teaching students to build a more robust society because what those students explain to us, characterize by definition, a society in which problems are going to be handled forthrightly, in which decisions are going to be considered thoughtfully and in which there is a “we” not just an “I”.