In this final act of evaluative summation, the students had let us know what they thought was important, and we were able to direct their questions in a way that produced a fair but demanding exam. We do not mean to suggest that this course was in every way the wonder we often deemed it. We had too many students, even with our small-group method, and our final grade results were not widely different from other sections of the survey course. Although our quadrant discussions prepared students for productive exchanges in the large group, a certain degree of confusion resulted whenever students had not read carefully. But our experiment did leave us with several valuable insights.
Students feel more inclined to participate in class when they see a model of professors in dialogue.
Students are also more willing to work hard when their efforts are related to the success of smaller and more clearly defined groups. Professors benefit from testing their ideas in the public forum of a classroom exchange with another teacher. Professors also owe it to themselves to challenge their own assumptions. The dialogic model serves students by encouraging them to speak for themselves and serves faculty members by forcing them always to listen before they speak. We would not advocate our model for all courses or even for all literature courses.