Television Chat Show Discussion Strategy: Explanation
Set the room up as follows.
Place one chair at the front. This is the presenter’s chair.
Next to that, angled-in slightly, place three or four chairs for the ‘guests’ to sit in.
Move the tables to one side and arrange the rest of the chairs in two blocks, with a space down the middle.
The audience will sit in these chairs and the ‘guests’ will enter by walking between the two blocks.
Prior to the lesson, cut up enough pieces of card so that each member of the class can take one piece from you upon entering the room.
All but four of these cards should be blank.
Two should have ‘for’ written on them and two should have ‘against’ written on them.
The cards should be handed out face down.
When all the learners are seated, ask them to turn their cards over.
The four learners who have ‘for’ or ‘against’ written on their cards will be the ‘guests’, everyone else is the audience.
Ask the ‘guests’ to go to the back of the room and then start the show by introducing the statement that will be discussed.
This should be something learners are already familiar with and which you are confident they will be able to talk about.
Introduce the ‘guests’ one by one – encourage the audience to clap and cheer as they walk to the front of the room and take up their seats.
Once all the ‘guests’ are sat down, begin asking them about the statement (the two learners who had the ‘for’ cards will argue in favour of it and the two who had the ‘against’ cards will argue against it).
After a period of discussion between you and the ‘guests’, start taking questions and points from the audience.
See where the discussion takes you!
Television Chat Show Discussion Strategy: Example
Topic: Analysis of bias in online news sites
The teacher sets the room up as detailed above and randomly selects the participants using the card method.
Previous lessons have focussed on how to look for bias in newspaper articles and learners are familiar with the topic.
With everyone in place, the teacher introduces the show and reveals the statement for discussion: ‘You can trust most of what you read on online news sites.’
The four learners who are playing the role of guests should be already familiar with the arguments around this statement, based on the work the class has done in previous lessons.
This ensures the teacher can facilitate a good discussion from the off.
Once the initial debate is over, the teacher chooses a range of audience members to either make contributions (perhaps developing the arguments that have already been shared) or to ask questions of the learners sat at the front.
This format continues until the teacher judges that the discussion is running out of steam.
As is evident, the activity can work especially well towards the end of a unit of work, perhaps preceding a written assessment.
Television Chat Show Discussion Strategy: Extensions and Developments
- Print out a picture of a microphone and glue it to a piece of card before cutting it out. Use this to interview audience members. It creates a nice response if the mocked-up microphone is revealed from some sort of hiding place at the point at which the teacher turns their attention from the ‘guests’ to the audience.
- If you have sufficient time, collect the cards in at the end of the discussion, shuffle them and redistribute them. Introduce a second proposition which is to be discussed (connected to the same topic as the first one) and instruct the four new ‘guests’ to come and join you at the front of the room for a new discussion.
- If you are unsure about the random method of guest selection, identify specific learners you want at the front instead. For example, you might pick some of your more-able learners in the knowledge that they will be able to talk at length and provide a good model for the rest of the class.
