by Beth McMurtrie, Chronicle of Higher Education Teaching Newsletter
Sean O’Neil teaches a general-education humanities course at the University of Nevada at Reno on ancient and medieval cultures. Or as he puts it, “precisely the sort of class whose work many students would be very happy to farm out to AI.”
Like many professors, O’Neil, who is the director of the university’s Core Humanities program, has noticed that today’s students struggle to communicate effectively, and they increasingly read and write with the help of AI.
As he was figuring out how to tackle both challenges, O’Neil heard about graded discussions, which he began using in the spring of 2025. The strategy has proved so successful that he’s been asked to share it with colleagues. He has seen his students’ conversational skills grow. They tell him it has improved their ability to study for written tests. And class discussions are a lot livelier.
“It has completely transformed the class,” O’Neil said when I talked to him recently. “And it has made it so much more of a seminar than it ever was.”
Over the past few weeks I’ve described the growing use of oral exams to counter AI misuse and noted the other benefits they bring. But oral exams are time consuming and draining. Meeting one-on-one, even for just 15 minutes, with every student can seem too daunting for many professors. And oral exams can be a challenge with larger classes. So when O’Neil wrote to me to describe how he uses graded discussions in his seminar, I thought this might offer a practical alternative to oral exams.
Graded discussions are designed around structured group conversations, meaning that the instructor evaluates several students in one sitting. The approach can be effective in introductory courses, where AI misuse is often most problematic. O’Neil built his course with a lot of scaffolding, so that students develop their conversational skills over a period of weeks before they sit down for the graded discussion.
Here’s how his course works.
In every class, O’Neil gives students the chance to practice and develop their discussion skills. He starts by assigning each student a different partner for each class. They introduce themselves and have a brief conversation about that week’s reading. After that, he gives a short lecture to provide context to what they have read. (Because O’Neil runs a tech-free classroom, he distributes paper copies of key passages to the class.)
He then hands out blue books and asks students to spend a few minutes writing about the specific passage and a question related to it, building on previous readings in the course. That is followed by a think-pair-share exercise in which students talk to each other about what they wrote.
Afterward, they transition to the heart of the class: the spotlight discussion, which lasts up to 15 minutes. O’Neil organizes his 30 or so students into groups of about 7. In every class, one of those groups must discuss the reflection question prompted by the reading — the same one they wrote about and talked about with a partner — while the rest of the class watches and takes notes. They can also take the discussion in new directions. O’Neil uses a social annotation program, Perusall, to help students prepare. Whichever group is in the spotlight that day is expected to annotate that week’s readings with questions and comments, around which they may build their discussion.
O’Neil gives students certain criteria they are expected to follow during the spotlight, and builds on those criteria each week. At the beginning of the semester, he starts simply: Everyone must look directly at their conversation partners and address them by name. In the next class he encourages students in the spotlight discussion to point to specific parts of a text they find interesting and explain why. As the semester goes on, he asks them to use other conversational techniques, such as asking follow-up questions, highlighting a source of confusion, and identifying missed opportunities in the discussion.
Once the spotlight discussion is over, he holds a class debrief, asking students what they noticed. “This part has been one of the huge surprises for me because students love talking about what happened in the spotlight discussions,” he said. “They love talking about ideas that surprise them, questions they hadn’t considered. They like praising a colleague for asking a great follow-up question.”
The spotlight is the preparation for the graded discussion, which he does twice a semester. On those days he has each group come in during an allotted time to conduct a 15-minute discussion while he takes notes. He presents the group with a prompt, gives them a minute or so to think it over, and then the discussion begins, without further intervention by him. He observes and takes notes, grading students in three categories: professionalism, understanding of the course material, and critical engagement.
O’Neil explains ahead of time what he’s looking for in those three areas. He also gives students their blue books, so they can refer back to something they wrote earlier that they think is relevant. And because students have practiced, and watched others, O’Neil said, the experience feels familiar.
O’Neil also conducts in-class written exams shortly after the graded discussions. His students have told him that the discussions are also good preparation for these exams.
O’Neil explains his focus on discussion by telling students that these are skills that will support them throughout life, whether they’re holding a conversation with a relative or teaming up with colleagues on a complicated problem at work.
With aspects of many jobs increasingly farmed out to AI, “part of what we have to do now is make an argument for what bringing the human into the loop offers,” O’Neil noted. “One of the best things that humans can do, and which they’re at present still needed for, is on-the-spot, real-time collaboration to find the solution to a common problem.”
Have you tried something similar in your courses? If so, write to me at [email protected] and your story may appear in a future newsletter.
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