Year: 2005
Type: article
Abstract: It is a moment every classroom teacher has encountered: In the middle of a class discussion of a text, a concept, a method—some element of the course material that must be covered—a student raises an unrelated (or only tangentially related) point that threatens to derail the entire discussion. The new point may be fascinating or intriguing, or so appealing as a line of thought or discussion that it is difficult to ignore. In fact, this unrelated point is generally more fascinating than the required course material to the student who brings it up. But there are the pressures of time and scheduling, and of covering that required material. Two roads (or more—sometimes as many roads as there are students in the room) diverge, and in order to achieve our goals for the course, we have to choose one of them. The one we choose is rarely the "road less traveled by, " the digression that we necessarily neglect. This choice reflects instructor training, evaluations of instructional design, and teachers ' own goals and preferences in terms of classroom management, all of which focus on controlling or limiting digression. This framework is often essential in the face-to-face classroom. If instructors followed every conversational thread or pursued every digression, any class session, whether a 50-minute meeting or a five-hour workshop, could be consumed with irrelevancies. The online classroom that includes asynchronous discussion is not subject to the same kind of time
Author: Joseph Ugoretz
Language: English
Topic: Online and Blended Learning
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W310688495