Volume XLVII, No. 17 | November 20, 2025
Using a Discussion-Based Approach to Teaching Text Analysis and Response
We all know that getting students to read even short articles or chapters can be a struggle. How much more so when the chosen text is a full-length book—and one written not for undergraduates or a popular audience but for highly-educated readers! Yet for those of us composition instructors committed to doing right by our students, there is little alternative: so closely, we know, is constant reading tied to long-term success as writers—and vice versa (Graham, 2020). As part of a unit devoted to developing skills in “Text Analysis and Response” in my English rhetoric class, I decided to assign my students C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. To encourage them to read the text in advance, I required them to develop two discussion questions (DQs) for the book’s first two parts and two more for the third and last (four total). Now that the class is over, I am able to reflect on some of the successes (and failures) I had working with this text. The lesson plans described below were partly influenced by my experiences as a summer fellow at the Great Questions Foundation and as a PhD student in the Great Books program at Faulkner University, both of which employ a similar, discussion-based approach to learning.
The basic idea behind a discussion-based pedagogy is that they enable the classroom to function like a kind of modern-day Socratic seminar, forcing the participants to adequately prepare for the lesson in advance and assume responsibility for their own education. Studies suggest that classroom discussion is an assessment method regarded favorably by students that can be especially effective in improving their learning (Nair & Feroze, 2023). It replicates the active role they will assume as public citizens once leaving school and therefore supports the general aims of a broad, liberal arts-based education. A discussion-based pedagogy is particularly suited for use in community colleges due to the large number of students nationwide who are enrolled in two-year schools, who tend to devote the majority of their credits to fulfilling general education requirements (The Great Questions Foundation, 2024).
The Abolition of Man was first published in 1943 and focuses on contemporary issues regarding education, science and technology, and the importance of moral values. Though written in English, and by one of the finest writers in the language of the twentieth century, it is full of classical allusions and Latin quotations, and can make for an “admittedly sometimes challenging work” (Ward, 2021, p. 1) even for graduate students, let alone those in a first year writing class. Abolition of Man was to be the focus of the second essay in my English rhetoric class, following one on basic persuasion. We would spend the whole of week 6 discussing the text in class, then work on the paper during the next two weeks. Throughout the early part of the semester, I repeatedly encouraged the students to read the book early so they would be prepared for the discussion and essay. Even if you choose to assign an easier text, you should probably warn them of the need to have the text read in advance so that they can submit their questions on time.
I created an assignment in the LMS for each student to submit his or her DQs. They were provided with specific instructions that detailed how to format their questions and ask ones that were primarily interpretive in nature: i. e., they could not be questions that can be answered with a simple “yes / no,” and they had to include a specific reference to a direct quote or passage from the text, with page number. They were to submit these questions before Sunday at midnight, which would give me some time to compile them all before the first discussion on Tuesday. About 15 / 18 students in each class submitted their questions, leaving me with 120 overall. This may sound like a lot, but many of the questions were basically identical, since multiple students kept asking about the same themes and passages. The book is quite short, after all.
My original plan was to simply copy and paste student questions into a Google doc, which I would share with them to facilitate discussion during class. What I ended up doing, however, was using their questions as “inspiration” for my own—essentially, I took note of the topics they seemed interested in and combined all of the different questions they had asked about them into a single, more simplified and concise, one. I also added a page range so that students knew where in the text they needed to look for answers.
To ensure that students did not get bored of discussing the same question all day, I divided the class periods up into several activities. On Tuesday, we watched a short video about Lewis, and I lectured a little on his life and other works. Since their next essay would be the first one in which they’d be quoting and citing sources, we talked about the differences between quotes and paraphrases on Tuesday and practiced doing in-text citations on Thursday. That left around half of each 1.25-hour class period for discussion.
I employed a variation of the think / pair / share technique to facilitate the students’ willingness to speak out in front of their classmates, which is something they had not had many opportunities to do at that point. I assigned each a number from 1 – 6 that corresponded with a specific DQ and gave them 10 minutes to review the relevant passage on their own, encouraging (but not requiring) them to write down their thoughts on the matter. Then I grouped together all the students who were assigned the same questions and had them talk about their respective answers for a few minutes, meeting with each group individually, to help them answer the questions and ensure they stayed on track. Finally, I went through each question with the entire class, with one student from each group summarizing their answers. In this way, I was able to satisfy one of the primary objectives of discussion-based seminars: allowing students to take responsibility for their own education and teach each other.
Looking back on the past term, I am more or less satisfied with how this lesson went. The biggest downside, I believe, is in the lack of creativity and originality shown by the students in generating their own discussion questions … despite clear instructions to the contrary, most asked very simple, superficial questions that could be answered quickly, without leaving much room for discussion. I was able to alleviate this by rewriting their questions into my own, but it would be more in keeping with the spirit of discussion-based pedagogy to use actual questions submitted by the students. Perhaps next time, I could require them to submit fewer questions but put more thought into each one. Aside from that, I thought the lesson proved successful in getting students to engage with an especially challenging text. The essays they turned in later suggest that it had additional benefits, as well, such as minimizing the temptation to plagiarize.
Camilo Peralta, Associate Professor of English, Joliet Junior College, camilo.peralta@jjc.edu
References
Graham, S. (2020). The sciences of reading and writing must become more fully integrated. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(1): S35-S44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48587602
Nair, G. G., and Feroze, M. (2023). Effectiveness of multiple-choice questions (MCQS) discussion as a learning enhancer in conventional lecture class of undergraduate medical students. Medical Journal of Dr. D. Y. Patil Vidyapeeth, 16(8): 183-88. https://www.doi.org/0.4103/mjdrdypu.mjdrdypu_192_22
The Great Questions Foundation. (2023). Our Vision. https://www.tgqf.org/vision/
Ward, M. (2021) After Humanity: A GiudeGuide to C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man. Word on Fire Books.