Speed dating: a protocol for student discussion

As teachers seek to cultivate their students’ questioning and discussion skills, as called for in component 3b of the Danielson Framework, they often turn to structures that are designed to promote conversations in classroom. There are many tried-and-true protocols that teachers use to help students frame their dialogues, but lately I’ve been playing with a real-world classic: speed dating. The speed dating protocol can be modified in many ways for a wide range of classrooms: the teacher can manipulate the duration and number of the conversations, the physical layout of the room, the delivery system for the prompts, and, of course, the prompts themselves.

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In a 12th-grade ELA classroom at Fordham Leadership Academy, I wanted to kick off a unit on personal essays by inviting students to brainstorm responses to some of the prompts from the Common Application. Seeking to avoid using what the students called the “same old protocols,” I shook things up by inviting students to have a series of “speed dates” in which their conversations would be guided by those essay prompts.

​Here are the main moves:

• Prepare the space. The quickest way to let students know that a lesson won’t be “business as usual” is to rearrange the furniture. In this instance, I set up the desks in two concentric circles that faced each other. For a bit of extra flair, I invested some prep time in taping slips of paper that contained the conversation prompts under each desk and each chair, which let me make a fun Oprah joke (You get a prompt! And you get a prompt!) during the lesson. That said, if, for whatever reason, you can’t set up your room’s desks this way, it’s quite simple to adjust the protocol for the layout and traffic flow of any space.

• Prepare the conversation prompts. This step was easy for me, as I simply selected four Common Application essay prompts and offered a few footnotes that translated some of the words into Spanish for our English language learners. I’ve also used this protocol in a history class in which each prompt was an open-ended question about the content we were covering, and in an algebra class in which each prompt was an equation that required students to solve for a variable.

• Prepare the note catchers. As each student made their way through their four “dates,” they carried a graphic organizer, which their conversation partners used to take notes. At the end of the four conversations, each student had four seeds of stories that they could develop into personal essays.

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• Call the dance. This structure doesn’t ask students to do anything they don’t know how to do, but it can be tricky for them to immediately grasp the procedure for moving around the room. Thus, like a caller at a square dance, it’s necessary for a facilitator to guide their students through the steps with some simple instructions.