Session Design → The First Session

Begin

“As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.”

— bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

1. ✨ Welcome & Introductions

Welcome, everyone! During the First Session, we’ll go around and introduce ourselves using a prompt.

Prompt: Share your name, pronouns if you wish, and what made you sign up for the cohort. The Instructor might facilitate another question or two to help everyone to get to know each other.

2. 🌱 Group Agreements

Then we’ll review our Group Agreements and discuss as a group. We’ll embrace the vulnerability of showing up — and encourage authenticity as we begin!

1. Courageous Participation: To participate in a learning community, there is always an element of risk. We embrace that risk with curiosity, vulnerability, and honesty. 

2. Honest Inquiry: We come to this space as unique individuals. We seek to further attune ourselves to own questions and interests, and we claim the power to change and expand our minds. We give ourselves permission to slow down and ask ourselves what feels true, and what matters most in the moment. 

3. Equitable Space: Each one of us has an important part to play in the discussion. Assume the right of speaking, using one voice at a time. While we’ll aim for roughly equal time to speak, we are more interested in witnessing each other’s honest self-expression. 

4. The Art of the Pause: In a slow and spacious dialogue, students are encouraged to pause and reflect as we go. Silences are welcome, and even “awkward” silences can lead to moments of collective discovery. 

5. Productive Disagreement: Disagreement can lead to important moments of learning. We commit to navigating different opinions and perspectives with a spirit of generosity and respect, with the intent to listen to and understand each other as best as we can. 

6. Self-Agency: We believe that we are each discovering our own best way of learning — and we are free to make choices that support us, even as we are stretched and challenged.

   We recognize neurodiversity, personalities, privileges, histories, health needs, and backgrounds. 

7. The Text is the Teacher:Ultimately, the text is the teacher we are trying to listen to together. During times of uncertainty or disagreement, we can always turn back to the text as our primary conversation partner.

3. ⚡ Housekeeping

Once we’ve done introductions and gone over Group Agreements, we’ll do some brief Zoom housekeeping and an overview of the session structure, reading schedule, and text.

The First Session always takes a bit more time — but it’s worth it to lay a strong foundation as a group.

All this should take around 20-30 minutes.

4. 💬 Discussion

Once we’ve laid this foundation, we’ll start the session with a round of Recall, followed by an Opening Question, and then the first Discussion.

1. Recall: We’ll do a 5-10 minute exercise to help us access knowledge solely from memory. We will share words, phrases, ideas, questions, and moments that we remember off the top of our minds — without the need to layer on interpretation. This exercise aims to build knowledge and demonstrate initial comprehension of the reading, while also connecting us as a team. 

2. Opening Question: After we’ve done a few rounds of Recall and everyone has had the chance to speak, we’ll begin with an Opening Question. This is a well-designed, yet open-ended question that the Instructor will ask the cohort. They will then let the cohort take the reins. It provides a doorway into the text, and will always be connected to a key learning objective.

3. Discussion: We will begin to make statements and observations, ask questions, and present our interpretations of the book. Cohorts will practice building on ideas, encountering agreements and disagreements, and making collective decisions to transition the conversation into new threads. Each student will have the opportunity to not only contribute, but to lead the group into an idea. The instructor is there to serve as an attentive, expert guide on the text and on the art of the dialogue. They will affirm key ideas and movements and help the group work through “hot and cold” moments, all while giving the cohort agency to direct where the conversation goes next.

5. 🌀 Summarize

In the final 10 minutes of each session, we will bring the discussion a close and summarize what we’ve discussed — tracing where the dialogue led to the most exciting moments of learning, and noticing where it felt challenging or stagnant. 

This is a moment where the instructor will invite each student to contribute a thought. 

The goal is to build metacognitive awareness—awareness of our thinking processes—without any  judgement, on our individual and collective process and contribution. 

6. 📝 Closing Prompt

In the final few minutes, the instructor will offer three well-designed prompts based on the age/cohort type and the content of that session’s reading: 

1. An academic writing prompt (e.g., a research essay).

2. A creative writing prompt (e.g., a persona poem or a text-to-life essay).

3. A research activity prompt (e.g. dig up more on the origins of words, texts, ideas, and key concepts we explored).

Students are encouraged to continue the conversation in the Circle space.

Keep Exploring the Session Flow