Online Discussion Threads: An Exercise in Civil Discourse

The intent of this research project was to address a perceived lack of capacity to address controversial topics or differences of perspective with civil discourse when engaged in learning in an online graduate course. Using carefully designed discussion prompts, students were asked to post, respond and reflect on their own research projects and those of their classmates in small professional learning communities. With the desired skills having been specifically taught in multiple modalities, these written artifacts were graded with posted rubrics and feedback was distributed individually to students. Over the course of three classes taken in three semesters, student scores were tracked and recorded. The preliminary results, as analyzed here, do not show significant growth in depth of analysis or clarity of response. While student overall scores tended to be in the 80-90% range, the feedback distributed to students still reflected the need for specificity, meaningfulness of responses, and analytical depth. The researcher continues to wonder whether this is a reflection of the students' lack of ability or lack of willingness to say the difficult things necessary to be a critical friend in a professional learning community. The researcher proposes to continue to read and develop additional data collection tools and teaching devices that will provide better opportunity to impact the development of this critical capacity to speak with integrity and honesty in the effort to help colleagues collaborate effectively toward the goal of greater teaching effectiveness and student learning outcomes in their own classrooms.