Facilitating Student-to-Student Discussion--Suggestions?

I teach a high school Current Issues course. As part of a student project on potential immigration policies, students were allowed to develop questions to evaluate each group's policy solution. However, when the questioning began, many students approached it as an opportunity to pick a point--in a non-productive kind of way--and to "win" an argument by "catching" groups at doing something wrong. In other words, instead of asking a question in a way that would facilitate learning or higher order thinking skills, questions were asked in an attack mode reminiscent of something one would see at a presidential debate.





Does anyone out there have any suggestions on how to go about maintaining a sense of decorum with student-to-student questions without having an absolute breakdown of order in this classroom--or without having students feel personally attacked?





I've been teaching 11 years, and this is the first time in awhile where I am a bit at a loss!

Facilitating Student-to-Student Discussion--Suggestions?
I know this is a pretty common strategy, but have you tried doing a structured Socratic Seminar. It works well in my class and each of the students have to record the discussion. If you look online there are hundreds of handouts and strategies for this discussion. During the session, if the conversation moves away from the point, I have a student who has index cards that can pass them out to students to ask additional questions. I am not sure if this is the type of format you are hoping for, but they work well to teach students how to dialogue.
Reply:Along with many others, I have been thinking about immigration policies for a long time. I really don't think there is any way this problem can be effectively solved without causing immense suffering. (If I had what I think is a viable solution, I would be widely advocating its adoption.)





Your mistake is in expecting a productive solution for this problem. I am convinced that finding a "productive" solution is impossible, and as long as you bring up immigration/migration problems for classroom discussion, you will have to put up with the problems you have described.





These problems, as I am sure you know, are not confined to the United States. They are driven by limited economic opportunities for many people in a world that is already overpopulated.





Harleigh Kyson Jr.