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, 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

How to Read Hard Texts in CIE

Goals

  • To develop a repeatable strategy for reading difficult texts
  • To budget reading time honestly across different genres
  • To build the commonplace book and personal glossary as working tools
  • To know where to find support and why the course is designed the way it is

Background Reading and References

Every text on this syllabus was written for readers who did not yet exist — including you. Nobody arrives at college already knowing how to read Plato, Alter’s Genesis, or Victorian scientific prose; those are skills this course exists to build, and this page is designed so that students with every kind of reading background, pace, and format preference can build them. Use it before each new text, not just the first one.

The Three-Pass Strategy

Hard texts are not read once; they are read in passes, and each pass has a different job.

  1. Pass one: survey (10-15 minutes). Before reading a word closely, flip through the whole assignment. Read the first and last paragraphs, the section breaks, any headings or footnotes, and the first sentence of a handful of paragraphs. Your goal is a map, not comprehension: what kind of text is this, how long is it really, and where does it seem to turn?
  2. Pass two: close read with pencil (the main event). Read the whole assignment with a pencil (or its digital equivalent) in hand. Mark passages that strike you, confuse you, or repeat; write questions in the margins; argue back. A page with no marks on it is a page you have not yet read. This is also where quote-harvesting happens (see below).
  3. Pass three: return to the hardest paragraph (10-15 minutes). After finishing, go back to the single paragraph that resisted you most and read it again slowly — aloud if it helps. Often it unlocks now that you know where the text was going. If it still resists, bring it to class: the hardest paragraph is usually where the best discussion lives.

Reading with the Four A’s

When a text resists you — or when you resist it — a fourth pass with four questions can break the standoff. Mark the text for:

  1. What assumptions does the author hold? Finding what the author takes for granted turns a frustrating text into a legible one, because the parts that seemed arbitrary usually follow from an assumption you had not yet spotted.
  2. What do you agree with in the text? Locating real agreement first keeps resistance from hardening into dismissal, and gives your later disagreement something solid to stand on.
  3. What do you want to argue with? Naming a specific objection to a specific passage converts a vague dislike into a discussable position — the difference between “I didn’t like it” and a seminar contribution.
  4. What parts do you aspire to? Even a text you fight usually contains a sentence you wish you had written, and finding it keeps the reading generous enough to stay accurate.

This is the protocol behind the Four A’s Reading Response (/Participation/FourAs), where it becomes a submittable written response. Source: Gray, J., “Four ‘A’s Text Protocol,” National School Reform Faculty (NSRF), https://www.nsrfharmony.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/FourAsTextProtocol-N.pdf.

Building the Argument: From Reading to Persuading

Reading well is half the course; the other half is turning what you read into arguments. A compact playbook:

  • A thesis worth having is arguable (a reasonable person who has done the reading could disagree), specific (it names the texts and the relationship it claims between them), provable (it can be supported with quotable passages), and consequential (it answers “so what?”). A sentence everyone would nod at is a summary, not a thesis.
  • Every piece of evidence needs its warrant. The working unit of an essay paragraph is the chain claim → evidence → warrant: your assertion, the quotation that supports it, and — the step most often skipped — your own 2-3 sentences of reasoning showing why that quote supports that claim (adapted from Toulmin, S., The Uses of Argument, Cambridge University Press, 1958).
  • Acknowledge and concede before you rebut. The strongest essays plant a naysayer: they state the best objection fairly, concede what is genuinely right in it, and only then answer it (Graff, G. and Birkenstein, C., “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, W. W. Norton). An objection stated weakly convinces no one, including you.
  • Signpost, and summarize others fairly. Tell the reader where the argument is and where it is going, and state views you disagree with in language their holders would recognize as accurate — fair summary is both an ethical habit and a persuasive one.
  • Know your registers of persuasion. Ethos persuades through the credibility of the writer, earned here by accurate quotation and fair summary; pathos persuades through the reader’s emotions, legitimate but never load-bearing in an academic essay; logos persuades through reasoning and evidence, and it is the primary register of CIE essays.

Each move has a workshop mini-assignment where you practice it before drafting: the Thesis Workshop (/Participation/ThesisWorkshop), the Evidence Workshop (/Participation/EvidenceWorkshop), and Counterargument and Concession (/Participation/Counterargument). After the draft and your Writing Fellow conference, the Draft Reflection: Four A’s on Your Own Draft (/Participation/DraftFourAs) is the post-conference companion that turns the conversation into a revision plan.

Quote-Harvesting for the Commonplace Book

During pass two, harvest as you go: when a sentence stops you, copy it into your commonplace book with its page number and one line about why it stopped you. Do this while reading, not afterward — quotes harvested in the moment come with your reaction attached, and those reactions become writing-prompt responses, essay evidence, and entries in The Machine Question (/Participation/MachineQuestion), the semester-long strand of your commonplace book, with almost no extra work. Aim for three to five harvested quotes per assignment; more is fine.

Time Budgets

Different genres read at radically different speeds, and pretending otherwise is how reading plans fail. These are estimates for a careful pass-two reading, per class assignment:

Text type Our texts Budget Why
Poetry (fragments and lyric) Sappho, Islamic mystic poetry 1-1.5 hours for a few pages Poems are short but dense; each one is read several times, and the white space is part of the text
Epistle / letter Adichie, Coates 1.5-2.5 hours Reads quickly but addresses you; the work is in pausing to answer back
Philosophical dialogue Plato (Allegory, Euthyphro) 2-2.5 hours Every exchange advances an argument; skimming loses the thread
Scripture with commentary Genesis (Alter) 2-2.5 hours You are reading two texts at once: the translation and the footnotes
Scientific prose Darwin 2.5-3 hours Victorian sentences and a long argument; the slowest reading on the syllabus
Literary journalism McPhee 2-2.5 hours Fast-moving narrative carrying a slow-moving argument
Argumentative nonfiction Deloria, McLuhan 2-2.5 hours Bold claims that reward stopping to test them
Fiction / novella Forster 1.5-2 hours The story pulls you along; budget time to reread the ending

Budget the hours in your week before the week begins. Two shorter sessions beat one long one for nearly everyone.

Roadmaps for the Three Densest Reads

Coates, Between the World and Me
  • Expect a book-length letter in sustained second-person address: Coates is writing to his son, and you are reading over the son’s shoulder — the “you” is not you, and noticing that is part of the reading.
  • Readers commonly stall in the long paragraphs where memory, argument, and grief braid together without section breaks; do not wait for a break that is not coming — set your own stopping points.
  • When stuck, read aloud. The book’s rhythm is oral, and passages that resist the eye often open to the ear.
  • Track the recurring words — the body, the Dream, the streets — as if they were characters; they accumulate meaning across the book.
  • One orienting question: what does Coates insist can only be said about bodies, and never about abstractions?
Genesis, in the Alter Translation
  • Expect two voices on every page: the translation above and Alter’s footnotes below. Read the footnotes as a second voice in the conversation, not as optional apparatus — they are where the Hebrew’s wordplay, ambiguity, and strangeness come through.
  • Readers commonly stall by reading the familiar stories on autopilot; Alter’s whole project is to make them unfamiliar again, so slow down precisely where you think you already know what happens.
  • The doubled creation accounts (Genesis 1 versus 2-3) are a feature, not an error; read them as two texts standing side by side and ask why both were kept.
  • Genealogies and repetitions have jobs; skim them for pattern rather than skipping them entirely.
  • One orienting question: where does Alter’s translation differ from the version of the story you carry in your head, and what does the difference change?
Darwin, On the Origin of Species (selections)
  • Expect Victorian sentences: long, qualified, courteous, and built like arguments in miniature. Read them at sentence speed, not paragraph speed, and reread freely.
  • Readers commonly stall in the piles of examples (pigeons, barnacles, seeds); track the argument, not the examples — each pile exists to support one claim, so name the claim in the margin and move on.
  • Darwin anticipates objections constantly; when he raises one, mark it — his handling of counterarguments is a model for your own essays.
  • Watch his tone: the caution is strategic, and noticing where he hedges tells you where he knows the stakes are highest.
  • One orienting question: what, exactly, is Darwin most worried his readers will refuse to believe, and how does he try to earn it?

Multiple Formats (UDL)

Where legitimate editions exist, you may supplement your reading with other formats: published audiobook editions (Coates reads his own audiobook, and audio recordings of Darwin and Forster exist in the public domain), and recorded lectures on Plato, Genesis, and Darwin from reputable university sources. These are supplements, clearly marked as such — the CIE Reader and our assigned editions remain the citable text. Listening can carry you through a hard stretch, but page numbers, translation choices, and the footnotes live in the assigned edition, and all quotations in your writing must come from it.

The Glossary Habit

Keep a personal glossary page in your commonplace book. Every text on this syllabus has load-bearing words — eikasia, piety, hesed, natural selection, the Dream, the medium — and hard reads get easier the moment you stop re-deriving what a word means each time you meet it. One line per word: the word, where you met it, and your own working definition (revised when the text proves you wrong).

Where to Get Help

The Center for Writing and Speaking supports reading as well as writing: bring a passage that will not open, a draft that will not start, or a reading schedule that keeps collapsing. Our course Writing Fellow, office hours, and your classmates’ marginalia are all legitimate tools. Asking for help with a hard text is not a workaround; it is how hard texts have always been read.

Why the Course Is Built This Way (A Transparency Note)

Every essay in this course moves through draft → Writing Fellow conference → revision, and that is not busywork: the design assumes that writing is rewritten — that nobody, including your professors and the authors on this syllabus, produces finished thinking in one pass. The scaffolded deadlines exist so that the conference happens when a draft can still change, and so that students arriving with every level of writing experience get the same structured chance to improve. Reading works the same way, which is why this page teaches passes instead of heroics. If the system ever stops making sense for you, say so; the design serves the learning, not the other way around.

Rotating Discussion Roles

Goals

  • 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

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

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.