Thanks for this! I especially appreciated the recommendations for doing 2-person reading groups, and for having presentations include criticisms.
On top of your recommendations, here’s a few additional ideas that have worked well for reading groups I’ve participated in/helped organize, in case others find them useful. (Credit to Stanford’s The Precipice and AI Safety reading groups for a bunch of these!)
Break up a large group into small groups of ~3-4 people for discussion
This avoids large-group discussions, which are often bad (especially over Zoom).
Have readings be copied into Google Docs, with a few bolded lines at the top encouraging people to add a few comments in the doc.
This prompts people to generate thoughts on the material, and it adds a few interesting ideas to the reading.
Have participants vote on which questions to discuss: digitally share a Google Doc with potential discussion questions, then give people ~5 minutes to write “+1” next to all questions they’d like to discuss.
Small groups can do this to decide what to have as the focus point of their conversation.
Alternatively, organizers can use this to break a large group into small groups based on people’s interests, like this (adapted for Zoom times):
The organizer encourages people to add & vote on questions for ~5 min.
The organizer identifies the most popular questions—enough of them that each small group could discuss a different one if they wanted to.
The organizer communicates to the group which questions were most popular, and labels each of these questions with a number.
The organizer encourages people who are especially interested in some of the questions to indicate this (e.g. by messaging a number to the Zoom chat).
The organizer creates groups of 3-4 people, trying to put together people who indicated interest in the same question.
When generating discussion questions, lean away from very vague or big-picture questions.
Very specific questions (which might be sub-questions of big-picture questions) seem to lead to much more fruitful discussion.
These are great ideas! I love all of the practical zoom-call-management suggestions. Splitting into breakout rooms based on upvoted questions in a Google doc sounds quite fun, I may have to try that.
Thanks for this! I especially appreciated the recommendations for doing 2-person reading groups, and for having presentations include criticisms.
On top of your recommendations, here’s a few additional ideas that have worked well for reading groups I’ve participated in/helped organize, in case others find them useful. (Credit to Stanford’s The Precipice and AI Safety reading groups for a bunch of these!)
Break up a large group into small groups of ~3-4 people for discussion
This avoids large-group discussions, which are often bad (especially over Zoom).
Have readings be copied into Google Docs, with a few bolded lines at the top encouraging people to add a few comments in the doc.
This prompts people to generate thoughts on the material, and it adds a few interesting ideas to the reading.
Have participants vote on which questions to discuss: digitally share a Google Doc with potential discussion questions, then give people ~5 minutes to write “+1” next to all questions they’d like to discuss.
Small groups can do this to decide what to have as the focus point of their conversation.
Alternatively, organizers can use this to break a large group into small groups based on people’s interests, like this (adapted for Zoom times):
The organizer encourages people to add & vote on questions for ~5 min.
The organizer identifies the most popular questions—enough of them that each small group could discuss a different one if they wanted to.
The organizer communicates to the group which questions were most popular, and labels each of these questions with a number.
The organizer encourages people who are especially interested in some of the questions to indicate this (e.g. by messaging a number to the Zoom chat).
The organizer creates groups of 3-4 people, trying to put together people who indicated interest in the same question.
When generating discussion questions, lean away from very vague or big-picture questions.
Very specific questions (which might be sub-questions of big-picture questions) seem to lead to much more fruitful discussion.
I love and appreciate these suggestions! I’ll be stealing the idea about copying readings into google docs and am super excited for it.
These are great ideas! I love all of the practical zoom-call-management suggestions. Splitting into breakout rooms based on upvoted questions in a Google doc sounds quite fun, I may have to try that.