Discussant Guidelines
Each student will be a discussant once during the quarter. Your goal as discussant is to help drive an engaged and stimulating discussion. You will be assigned one of the papers from that week. Other discussants on the same day will be assigned different papers.
Your responsibilities as discussant include:
Create a commentary synthesis for your section
Your commentary synthesis is a summary of others’ commentaries in your section. Your TA will let you know which paper to focus your commentary synthesis on. After that paper’s commentaries are due, and before your discussion section, read through other students’ responses. Generate a short slide presentation highlighting interesting or common ideas in the commentaries in your own discussion section. You and your section TA will use this slide deck to help guide discussion. Submit your commentary synthesis to the Discussant assignment in Canvas by the start of section, and share it during section.
To create your commentary synthesis, first identify key insights from the critiques and cluster them around noteworthy themes. Organize the slides with headers around each of these themes, with excerpted quotes from others’ commentaries as bullets illustrating each theme. Themes should be clusters of what people said, regardless of whether you agree with the point of view or whether you think that it’s an insightful perspective. That way, we can discuss themes and why each is or is not an insightful critique — feedback on the commentaries that is an important part of learning for the class. The themes don’t need to be chosen based on popularity: feel free to create a theme around a single comment if you want, if you think it’s an interesting perspective to discuss. Name the author of each quote, so that the staff can call to the student in class if they want to hear that person expand on the point in their own words.
Second, for each theme, add a slide containing your response to the points being raised. Take a position! Stake out a thesis of your own. Do you agree with one side or the other—and if so, why do you find one of the sides a more compelling argument?—or can you offer an alternative perspective that the section didn’t articulate?
Here is a example template slide deck for you to use - feel free to modify the template as you wish, or make your own slides.
Lead discussion in section using your commentary synthesis
As discussant, select some of the themes that are most worth discussing and launch discussion in section on each theme with your own summary and response. This does not need to be formal—aim for two minutes for a summary and your own thoughts and response. It should cover:
The discussion will work as follows: first, you will share your commentary synthesis. Pick a particularly interesting theme, share your own response, then use that response as a launching point for discussion. We expect that you, as the local expert, will contribute actively in this discussion. We may hop around between themes: if one comes up in discussion that you saw in the commentaries, speak up and share what you heard in the commentaries, and invite relevant section members to speak up.
Sections are about eighty minutes long, and we often cover four papers per week, so expect somewhere in the realm of twenty minutes discussing your paper.
Grading rubric
Typically, “proficiency” indicates that the work is deserving of some flavor of A, and “mastery” a strong A.
| Category | Insufficiency | Adequacy | Proficiency | Mastery |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commentary Synthesis 10 points |
Commentary synthesis is incomplete or impossible to follow. | Commentary synthesis demonstrates minimal depth in the themes identified and the quotes chosen. | Commentary synthesis demonstrates moderate depth in the themes identified and the quotes chosen. | Commentary synthesis demonstrates exceptional depth in the themes identified and the quotes chosen. |
| Discussion 10 points |
Summary, reactions, and contributions in section are incomplete or unclear. | Summary, reactions, and contributions in section are unclear at communicating the class's ideas and the discussant's response. | Summary, reactions, and contributions in section are moderately clear at communicating the class's ideas and the discussant's response. | Summary, reactions, and contributions in section are exceptionally clear at communicating the class's ideas and the discussant's response. |