Mrs. Schuster Adopts Discussion: A Four-Week Experiment in an English Classroom.

We were meeting over school lunch in a noisy high school cafeteria. Mrs. Schuster had only twenty-five minutes between classes, so our conversation would need to be brief and to the point. We had become friends or at least educational compatriots while conducting a study in which we had regularly observed her teaching for a period of six months. And yet it was difficult to open this conversation over a slightly stale cheese sandwich, lukewarm tomato soup, and a carton of 2% milk. "We've been listening to the tapes we made while we were observing your class." A pregnant pause. "Have you considered listening to yourself as you teach?" At that she smiled, looked up from her soup, and said, "You mean I talk too much in class, don't you?" Precisely. But, it was difficult to say it. At the beginning of the six month study in which we had observed Mrs. Schuster and one other English teacher, we asked them to indicate what teaching methods they preferred to use while instructing secondary school students in the study of literature. Mrs. Schuster listed discussion, recitation, paraphrase, and oral reading in that order. As her preferred method, she believed she used discussion frequently at least three or four times a week while teaching literature. But, our observations over a six month period failed to support this claim. Almost all socalled discussion time was really time spent using recitation. In practice, only five percent of class time was used for discussion, while forty-four percent was devoted to recitation and fifty-one percent to paraphrase and oral reading. Perhaps in Mrs. Schuster's mind there was little distinction between recitation and discussion: both methods require an active verbal interchange between participants. The interchange in recitation, however, is solely between a teacher and a student; while in discussion the interchange is predominantly between student and student. Also, as researchers, we had observed that the majority of students who were