CIE100: Common Intellectual Experience - Discussion Roles (0 Points)
Assignment Goals
The goals of this assignment are:- To understand the four rotating discussion roles and what each contributes to a seminar
- To prepare specifically for the role you hold on a given day
- To experience discussion from more than one seat over the semester
The Assignment
A seminar is not a set of parallel monologues; it is a conversation that someone has to open, someone has to keep honest, someone has to ground in the text, and someone has to knit together. To make those jobs visible — and to make sure participation takes more than one form — we rotate four structured roles through the section. On any given discussion day you may be assigned one; over the semester you will hold each of them more than once. Knowing your role in advance is a gift: it tells you exactly what to prepare and gives you a defined way to contribute even on a day when the reading left you unsure what you think.
Purpose
The roles exist for two reasons. First, they distribute the labor of a good discussion so it does not fall on whoever is most comfortable speaking. Second, they let you practice the distinct intellectual moves that strong discussion — and strong writing — are made of: framing a question, grounding a claim in evidence, pressing on an argument, and connecting ideas across texts. Each role rehearses one of those moves in public, low-stakes, before you have to perform it alone on the page.
The Four Roles
Facilitator
What you do: open the discussion and keep it moving. You arrive with two or three real questions (see the Preparing for Discussion guide on growing a question from a quotation), you invite specific people in — especially quieter voices — and you notice when the conversation has exhausted a thread and needs a new one.
How to prepare: write your questions in advance and sequence them from concrete (“what is actually happening in this passage?”) to interpretive (“what does it mean?”) to evaluative (“is it right? do we agree?”). Have one more question than you think you will need. Your job is not to have the answers; it is to make sure the room keeps asking.
Evidence Keeper
What you do: keep the discussion honest to the text. When someone makes a claim, you are the one who asks, kindly, “where do you see that?” and helps find the line. When the conversation drifts into opinion untethered from the reading, you bring it back to the page.
How to prepare: come with your anchor passages marked and their page numbers ready. Choose three or four lines you expect the discussion to need, and be ready to read them aloud. You are not the fact-police; you are the person who makes sure the section is arguing about this text and not about a half-remembered version of it.
Devil’s Advocate
What you do: keep the discussion from agreeing too easily. When the room converges, you voice the strongest objection — the counter-position a thoughtful dissenter would actually hold. You steelman the view no one in the room is defending.
How to prepare: use the steelman the other side exercise from the Preparing for Discussion guide. Write the best version of the argument against wherever you expect the class to land, anchored in at least one line from the text. The rule of this role is that your objection must be one a careful reader could genuinely hold — sincerity, not contrarianism.
Connector
What you do: knit the conversation together and tie it to the wider course. You listen for the moment two classmates are making the same point in different words, or opposite points that clarify each other, and you name it. You link the day’s text to an earlier one on the syllabus and to the four Core Questions.
How to prepare: before class, name one connection between today’s reading and something we have already read, and one way today’s text speaks to a Core Question — what should matter to me, how should we live together, how can we understand the world, what will I do? During class, keep a running note of who said what so you can, near the end, say “here is where we have been.”
How Roles Rotate
Roles rotate so that everyone holds each one several times across the semester; the rotation is posted or announced so you always know your assignment ahead of the meeting. On days with no formal role assignment — and in every role — the ordinary work of participation continues: everyone reads, everyone contributes, everyone listens. The roles add structure; they do not replace the shared responsibility for the conversation.
How Role Performance Counts
Serving in a role well is one of the clearest ways to earn both halves of your participation grade: it is a meaningful contribution on the day (the daily half-point) and it demonstrates the quality dimensions — preparation, contribution, listening and building, and intellectual risk — that the participation rubric rewards. A facilitator who sequences good questions, an evidence keeper who grounds the room, a devil’s advocate who steelmans in earnest, and a connector who ties the threads together are all, in different ways, doing exactly what the rubric describes at its proficient level.
See also
- Preparing for Discussion and How Participation Works (/Participation/PreparingForDiscussion) — the routine, the exercises, and the rubric.
- How to Read Hard Texts in CIE (/Assignments/ReadingGuide) — getting through the reading itself.
Submission
Nothing to submit. This is a support page; check which role is yours before class and prepare for it.Please refer to the Style Guide for code quality examples and guidelines.