CIE100: Common Intellectual Experience - Preparing for Discussion and How Participation Works (10 Points)

Assignment Goals

The goals of this assignment are:
  1. To arrive at each discussion with something specific to say and something specific to ask
  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 that there are many good ways to contribute 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. We build the section’s thinking together, one meeting at a time, and that only works when people show up ready to talk. Speaking up in a room of sixteen people about a text you met three days ago is hard, and it’s also a skill you can practice. That is what this page is for. Please come back to it before each new discussion, so you’re not improvising your way into the conversation.

Purpose

A seminar works when people have done the reading and when they show up with something to do with it. This guide gives you a routine for arriving prepared, a handful of exercises for the days when a text won’t open, and a clear picture of how I assess participation, so the grade rewards preparation and growth instead of how much airtime you take.

How Participation Is Earned and Evaluated

Your in-class participation grade is 30% of the course, and it has two halves. The syllabus describes both in full; here is the short version.

  • Daily participation is worth about half the points. You earn half a point toward your final grade for each class meeting in which you contribute meaningfully. I define “meaningfully” broadly 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. Try not to leave too many of those on the table.
  • Quality of engagement is worth the other half. I assess it holistically at midterm and again at the end of the term against four dimensions: preparation, contribution, listening and building, and intellectual risk. The rubric is on the syllabus. You will write a short self-assessment at both points (see below), so your own account of your growth is part of the grade.

Participation is a practice you get better at over the semester, and that is how I grade it. If the room is hard for you, the routine and exercises below are a way in, and my office hours are always open so we can make a plan together. Please don’t wait until it has become a problem.

A Repeatable Routine for Preparing

Please 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 page is about arriving ready to talk about it.

  1. Read in passes, pencil in hand. Use the three-pass reading from the reading guide, and mark up the page as you go.
  2. Mark two or three anchor passages. Find the moments that struck you, convinced you, confused you, or annoyed you. These are your entry tickets. If you’ve got three of them marked, you’ll never be stuck for something to point to.
  3. Annotate one passage for writing. 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 you harvest in the moment come with your reaction attached, and those reactions turn into discussion contributions and essay evidence later on with almost no extra work from you.
  5. Grow one question from a quotation. Take one harvested quote and turn it into a real question, the kind a careful reader could disagree about. I don’t want a quiz question with a known answer. A strong discussion question and a strong thesis are close cousins: the question opens (“How does…?”) and 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 at a line, and one thing you could imagine arguing against it. If you walk in with both, you can start the conversation and you can keep it honest.

Please bring your annotation or your grown question to class. It’s how I know the reading happened, and it’s exactly the raw material a discussion runs on.

Exercises to Prepare for Discussion

When the routine isn’t enough, either because a text is truly resisting you or because you want to sharpen a contribution before you make it, reach for one of these. They are general, so you can use any of them 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. You’ll use this move in every essay you write for me.
  • Point to the text. Take any opinion you hold about the reading and find the one line that most supports it, and then, harder, the one line that most complicates it. An opinion with a line under it is a contribution. An opinion without one is just 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. You’ll either sharpen your disagreement or discover it was thinner than you thought, and both of those 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, or a news story, and note what the borrower kept and what they dropped. It is an easy 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 four Core Questions come alive, and they tend to move a discussion further than anything else.

Ways to Contribute (UDL)

Speaking first and often is one way to participate, and for some of you it’s the natural one. It isn’t the only one, though, and I’ve built the daily credit 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 about the text often does more for a discussion than an answer does.
  • 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 quick follow-up in office hours or in your commonplace book keeps the thread alive.

If the spoken room is consistently hard for you, please talk to me early. I’d much rather find a path that works for you than watch you quietly accept a grade you aren’t happy with.

Self-Assessment (Midterm and End of Term)

At midterm and again at the end of the semester, please write a short self-assessment (half a page is plenty) and bring it to a quick 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, whether that was 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 of the term (or, at the end, one thing you will carry into your spring CIE section).

Your own account of your growth is part of this grade. It’s also the surest way to avoid surprises: if your sense of your participation and mine don’t match, this is where we find that out and fix it.

See also

Two companion pages

This page covers how you earn participation and how to prepare for it. Two longer guides used to live here and now have pages of their own, so you can read each one when you actually need it instead of all at once in week one:

Submission

Please come back to this page before each discussion, not just the first one. You earn the 10 points through the end-of-semester participation self-assessment described below, which you submit through Canvas.

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