CIE100: Common Intellectual Experience - Preparing for Discussion and How Participation Works (0 Points)

Assignment Goals

The goals of this assignment are:
  1. To arrive at each discussion with something specific to say, ask, and argue
  2. To understand how in-class participation is earned and evaluated
  3. To learn a repeatable routine and a set of exercises for preparing to discuss a hard text
  4. To recognize the many equally valid ways of contributing to a seminar

Background Reading and References

Please refer to the following readings and examples offering templates to help get you started:

The Assignment

In a discussion seminar your voice is part of the course material, and the section builds its thinking together one meeting at a time. That is a real responsibility and, for many students, a genuinely hard one — speaking into a room of sixteen people about a text you met three days ago is a skill, not a personality trait, and it is one this page exists to build. Nobody arrives already fluent in it. Use this page before each new discussion so that you never have to improvise your way into the conversation, and so that showing up prepared is a routine you run rather than a mood you hope for.

Purpose

Two things make a seminar work: that people come having done the reading, and that they come with something to do with it. This guide gives you a repeatable way to arrive prepared, a set of exercises for the days when a text will not open, and a clear picture of how your participation is assessed — so that the grade rewards preparation and growth rather than the volume of your voice.

How Participation Is Earned and Evaluated

Your in-class participation grade (30% of the course) has two halves, described in full on the syllabus and summarized here.

  • Daily meaningful participation is worth about half of the points: half a point toward your final grade for each class meeting in which you contribute meaningfully. “Meaningful” is broad on purpose — offering an idea or a question, building on a classmate, bringing in your pre-class writing, taking a discussion role, or contributing in whatever channel we are using that day all count. The point is to leave as few days on the table as you can.
  • Quality of engagement is worth the other half, assessed holistically at midterm and at the end against four dimensions: preparation, contribution, listening and building, and intellectual risk (the rubric is on the syllabus). You complete a short self-assessment at both points — see below — so your own account of your growth is part of the grade.

The design assumes that participation is a practice you improve at, not a fixed trait you are graded on. If the room is hard for you, the routine and exercises below are the way in, and my office hours are always open to make a plan.

A Repeatable Routine for Preparing

Run this before each discussion. It takes the reading you were going to do anyway and turns it into things to say. It pairs with How to Read Hard Texts in CIE, which is about getting through the text; this is about arriving ready to talk about it.

  1. Read in passes, pencil in hand. Do the three-pass reading from the reading guide. A page with no marks on it is a page you have not yet read.
  2. Mark two or three anchor passages. Find the two or three moments that most struck, convinced, confused, or annoyed you. These are your entry tickets: a student with three marked passages is never without something to point to.
  3. Annotate one passage for writing, not just comprehension. Take a single anchor passage and answer, in a sentence each: The thing that strikes me most about this is…; What I understand it to be saying is…; and how does this passage speak to each of the four Core Questions — what should matter to me, how should we live together, how can we understand the world, what will I do? This is the course’s own reading-to-write move, and the close reading you do here is already the first step of your next essay.
  4. Harvest three quotations into your commonplace book. Copy the lines that stopped you, each with its page number and one line on why. Quotes harvested in the moment come with your reaction attached; those reactions become discussion contributions and essay evidence with almost no extra work.
  5. Grow one question from a quotation. Take one harvested quote and turn it into a real question — not a quiz question with a known answer, but one a careful reader could genuinely disagree about. A strong discussion question and a strong thesis are the same object turned a quarter-inch: the question opens (“How does…?”), the thesis closes (“Because… , …”).
  6. Arrive with a position and a counter-position. Decide one thing you actually think about the reading and are ready to defend by pointing to a line — and one thing you could imagine arguing against it. Walking in with both means you can start the conversation and keep it honest.

Bringing your annotation or your grown question to class is the accountability check: it is the visible sign that the reading happened, and it is exactly the raw material the discussion runs on.

Exercises to Prepare for Discussion

When the routine is not enough — when a text truly resists you, or when you want to sharpen a contribution before you make it — reach for one of these. Each is general; use it on any reading on the syllabus.

  • The quarter-inch turn. Write your best observation about the text as a neutral sentence, then turn it into a question (“so what? / who would disagree?”), then turn the question into a claim someone could argue with. Bring whichever version is sharpest. This is the single most useful move in the course, and it is the same one every essay is built on.
  • Point to the text. Take any opinion you hold about the reading and find the one line that most supports it — and, harder, the one line that most complicates it. An opinion with a line under it is a contribution; an opinion without one is a mood.
  • Steelman the other side. Before class, write the strongest version of the view you disagree with — the version its holder would actually endorse, not a caricature. You will either sharpen your disagreement or discover it was thinner than you thought; both are good days in a seminar.
  • Sighting in the wild. Find the reading’s idea already loose in the culture — in a meme, a lyric, an advertisement, a news story — and note what the borrower kept and what they dropped. It is a low-stakes, high-engagement way in, and it doubles as a commonplace-book entry.
  • Two texts in one room. Put the day’s reading next to an earlier one on the syllabus and name one place they agree and one place they collide. Connections across texts are where the course’s four questions come alive, and they are the contributions that most move a discussion forward.

Ways to Contribute (UDL)

Speaking first and often is one way to participate, and for some students it is the natural one. It is not the only one, and the daily credit is designed to honor several:

  • Speak — offer an idea, a reading of a passage, or a question.
  • Build — respond to a classmate by name, extend their point, or press on it respectfully.
  • Ask — a real question of the text often does more for a discussion than an answer.
  • Take a role — the rotating discussion roles give you a defined job and a different way to shine on a given day.
  • Write into the room — when we use a shared document, a written thread, or exit notes, thoughtful writing there counts as fully as speaking.
  • Follow up — if a day gets away from you, a short follow-up in office hours or in your commonplace book keeps the thread alive.

If the spoken room is consistently hard for you, that is worth a conversation with me early, not a grade you accept quietly. The point of Universal Design is that the path to a strong participation grade should not require you to be the loudest person present.

Self-Assessment (Midterm and End of Term)

At midterm and again at the end of the semester, write a short self-assessment — half a page is plenty — and bring it to a brief conversation with me. Address:

  1. Preparation: How reliably have you been arriving with anchor passages and a question? What is your evidence?
  2. Contribution and listening: Name one discussion you moved forward, and one classmate whose thinking changed yours.
  3. Risk: Name one moment you took an intellectual risk — a position you were unsure of, or a mind you changed in public.
  4. A goal: One concrete thing you will do differently in the second half (or, at the end, one thing you will carry into your spring CIE section).

This is where your own account of your growth becomes part of the grade. It is also the surest way to make sure there are no surprises: if your sense of your participation and mine differ, the self-assessment is where we find out and fix it.

See also

Submission

Nothing to submit. This is a support page; return to it before each discussion, not just the first one.

Please refer to the Style Guide for code quality examples and guidelines.