Chapter 10

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Teaching Resources

Chapter 10

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Discussion Questions

1) Why did the small group meetings in East Germany lead people to resist, rather than support, the government?

  • What group processes have we discussed in this class that can help explain this outcome of group interaction?
  • What practical knowledge can we gain from this example?  How should this practical knowledge be used? In other words, what are the ethical implications of this practical knowledge?

2) What kinds of groups are you in (or do you know of) that help people feel connected to their communities?  What is unique about these groups?

3) Why are the social aspects of deliberation (depicted in Figure 10.1) important?

  • What would it be like to be in a conversation that met all the analytic criteria, but didn’t have the social processes?  Would that ever be appropriate?  If so, when?
  • What would it be like to be in a conversation that emphasized all the social aspects, but not the analytic processes?  Would that ever be appropriate?  If so, when?

4) What do you think of the possible paths that are depicted in Figure 10.2?

How many of the group archetypes are ones that you have experienced first-hand?
If you had to draw a path of your own group-life, what would it look like?

Section Activities

Group archetype map exercise

These documents cover an exercise in mapping and describing small-group archetypes. The exercise can be completed in discussion sections or in the larger class (or a combination of the two) near the end of the term, when you are discussing how the many different kinds of small groups in society may or may not be related to others. The Word document below provides information for instructors and a handout for students describing the exercise. The Powerpoint document provides a copy of Fig. 10.2 from The Group in Society for use as an instructional aid or starting point for discussion, as well as a blank version of Fig. 10.2 that students can fill out with their own map of small-group archetypes.

Classroom Activities

1) Deliberation In Practice

There are many videos available online that explain deliberation and dialogue and show examples of citizens engaging in deliberative discussion. These videos can be used to help students see what deliberation looks like in practice and can be a starting point for conversations about how deliberation can be used in groups, what aspects of group interaction they’ve learned about in class that are relevant to deliberation, etc. The Director of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, Sandy Heierbacher, posted links to many videos at: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=sheierbacher&view=playlists

2) Your Group as an Embedded System

Students should use the Embedded System Framework provided in Figure 10.3 to analyze their class group. Given everything they have learned in the course and the experiences they have had working together in groups, they should be able to discuss how well the issues described in the model fit their group’s experience. Student groups should work together to draw the model of their own group.

This process not only is an application of the material to a shared experience, it can also function as a kind of debrief session for the groups to process their work together through the course.

Groups should be able to discuss:

  • Which of the issues described in these boxes were the strongest influences on your group work in this course?
  • What challenges did you face as a group?  How can you use the embedded systems framework to talk about the causes, effects, or processes involved in those challenges?
  • What are the most important things you learned about working in groups during this class that can be helpful to you in your future group experiences?

To debrief this activity I would recommend going through the diagram one box at a time and asking students for examples of things from that box that were evident in their groups. This strategy will allow you to focus analytic attention on one part of the model at a time and keep all the students involved in the conversation (rather than having groups go one at a time to talk about the model as a whole). Then, move to a class discussion of the questions posed to students above.

3) Deliberation Activity

This activity involves asking some students to engage in a deliberative conversation and other students to observe and take notes about what they see. In classes of about 25 students, it works well to do this activity as a fishbowl where one small group (about 8 people) sits in the center of the class and the rest of the students sit around the edge to observe.  In larger classes it might work better to have about half of the students divide into groups to deliberate, and the half act as observers.
Instructions for Deliberating Group(s).

Provide students with informational material about a public issue and provide them with time to read through or watch it. The National Issues Forum website has very good issue booklets that are available on their website, some of which are available for download (http://nifi.org/). These issue booklets are good because they provide a good overview of the issue and several different perspectives on potential solutions. It is important to have more than two solutions presented so that participants do not simply polarize into partisan debate.

The NIF materials on “The Energy Problem: Choices for an Uncertain Future” (http://nifi.org/issue_books/guides.aspx?catID=11) have been useful in my classes in the past. Instructor should give an overview of the materials in the issue book so that the whole class has an understanding of the issue that will be discussed.
Then, it is useful to engage the deliberating group in a conversation about what behavioral guidelines they think should structure their conversation. How will they talk and listen to each other to help make their conversation deliberative? Write the guidelines on the board or somewhere that everyone can see. Students should understand that they are unlikely to come to a full decision in the time that they will discuss the issue, but they should still do their best to deliberate about the options and make some choices.

Instructors can act as a facilitator for the deliberating group. The NIF also provides moderator guides, which can be very useful for instructors who lead this activity. After the guidelines are set, I recommend letting the group discuss the issue in their own way (unless it gets way off topic or becomes too adversarial) because this is a learning exercise and at this point students should be fairly well prepared to muddle through this process based on their work in the course. I ask students to do their best to apply what they have learned in this discussion and, as a facilitator, I try to just stay out of the way as much as possible.

Give them about 20 minutes to deliberate on the options presented.

Instructions for Other Students

The rest of the class should be observing what they see in the deliberating group.  Use the attached sheets to help people guide their observations. Half of the observers should use the sheet labeled “Analytic Processes” and the other half should use the sheet labeled “Social Processes.” During the deliberative group’s discussion, the observers should watch the conversation and take notes as described on their handout.

Debrief/Discussion Questions

Start by asking the deliberating group to comment on their experience.

  • What was it like to have this conversation?
  • What struck you as the most interesting or memorable thing about this conversation?
  • How well do you think you deliberated?
  • What did your group do best?
  • What challenges did you have when you were deliberating?

Then ask the observers to comment on what they saw. Rather than going through the observer handouts and talk about each of the measures, I recommend starting by asking more general questions and then highlighting the criteria that seemed most relevant to the observers. If there is a criteria that doesn’t get discussed by observers (like, clarifying values), then I would ask about it specifically.

  • What did you notice about this group’s conversation?
  • What did this group do really well?
  • What evidence did you see of the analytic process?
  • What evidence did you see of the social process?
  • Based on what you saw today, what suggestions do you have that could help future deliberative groups?