GeoActivity Types in APHG: Discussions

Discussions are one of the activity types that help students build their content-related background knowledge, understanding, and concepts through various communication approaches (Harris et al. 2009; Hofer and Harris 2011). Students express and share their perspectives and ideas with other students through a smallor large-group discussion (Harris et al. 2009). The formats of discussions may vary; they may be synchronous or asynchronous and structured or unstructured (Hofer and Harris 2011). Because geography is a field of study addressing real-world issues, discussions are a particularly important pedagogy to understand geographical concepts and to come up with solutions for those issues (Delaney 1991). Through classroom discussions, students become active learners, improve their critical thinking skills, embrace diverse perspectives, and develop higher-order thinking skills (Brookfield and Preskill 1999; Dallimore, Hertenstein, and Platt 2004; Delaney 1991). These are essential skill sets not only for geography learning but also for other courses and can be built upon throughout the high school curriculum. Discussions also help teachers determine the level of students’ understanding of concepts. In this paper, we share an effective way of utilizing traditional face-to-face discussions with some suggestions for video discussions in the Advanced Placement Human Geography (APHG) classroom and helpful hints for successful discussions.