Bing: Let's talk about something more interesting, Bong. I'm tired of this subject.
 

Bong: Good idea, Bing. How about something to do with biology? That's among the most interesting of subjects, I think you'll agree.
 

Bing: By all means, let it be biology. Why not, in fact, begin with the most important and interesting subject in all of biology.
 

Bong: [Somewhat embarrassed] You can't mean...
 
 

This is the beginning of a dialogue about the properties of water. I use it and a number of other such dialogues in introductory biology classes at Hope College. Before I discovered the merits of dialogues, I used to give a lecture on this material to classroom full of uninvolved students. Now I have an noisy classroom full of students who are engaged in and thoroughly enjoying a potentially dull subject.

The use of dialogues for educational purposes has a long and honorable history. Plato explored the philosophy of Socrates in a large number of dialogues. Galileo wrote The Two Principal Systems of the World and The Two New Sciences in the form of dialogues, and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress contains substantial parts in dialogue form. I have enjoyed reading these particular dialogues; the form has certain important advantages for imparting information:

Dialogues give a subject a special interest and life by turning a discourse into a discussion.

Dialogues are an easy way to explore various points of view simply by embodying these points of view in different people in the dialogue.

Dialogues suggest a certain model of learning in which one is not merely receiving information, but acting on the ideas of others in order to make them one's own.

Some features of an introductory biology class I have been teaching encouraged me to try writing dialogues to use in the class. The result is a wonderful way to engage students in the material of a large lecture class, but the approach should work in classes of any size.

Since 1978, I have been teaching large lecture classes called "Principles of Biology I". For most of that time, these classes were fairly representative of the type -- all the students were in a single large section of 150 - 200 students, the classes were almost entirely lecture, sometimes two or more faculty members each were responsible for part of the total semester, a high proportion of the students didn't succeed, many of them withdrew before the semester ended, and only about half continued in the second semester. In 1992, as a result of faculty crises of conscience about how the class was conducted, we initiated a set of changes: classes were made smaller (60 per section), one teacher taught the entire semester, and a variety of alternatives to lectures were adopted to increase the participation of students. One of these methods was the dialogue.

Of special concern to us were the "silent students" in the class, many of whom attended regularly but never participated in class by asking questions or speaking up in any way and often did not come to see us in our office hours either. A considerable proportion of these students were women and minority students, but that was not exclusively so. The tendency to isolation seemed to be a more general hazard of the first year experience that was exacerbated by the large class size and lecture approach (Hall and Sandler, 1982). After all, if the professor was delivering all the information anyway, what reason was there really for speaking up?

The dialogue can be a way of eliciting participation by the silent students. They speak and engage in discussion but without the risk of saying something "wrong." They speak with one another about important points in the class in an atmosphere of light heartedness and minimum risk. The level of commitment can be raised subtly in dialogues as the semester proceeds so that many students who would otherwise never speak are drawn into significant participation. As an extra bonus, material that is not terribly interesting to present in a lecture format can even be made fun in the context of a dialogue.

Here is a typical application. The subject was the properties of water that are of biological importance. I told the students that I had grown weary of the theater and had thus decided to reform it. For centuries now most people at the theater had to sit quietly and watch while the much smaller number of actors got to have all the fun. To remedy that, I had written a play in which everyone participated while I watched. Students were formed into teams of two, and each team was instructed to pick up some props -- cups of water and ice, a needle, some capillary tubes of varying diameter. Then when they had their props they were given scripts and were told that each pair was to perform the play aloud and simultaneously. I walked around and encouraged students who seemed reluctant to participate.

In a class of 60, the result is noisy and seemingly chaotic as each cast of 2 performs its play. At certain times they had to use their props to demonstrate that ice floats, that surface tension holds up needles and that water moves higher in capillary tubes of smaller diameter. Occasionally the stage directions ask them to draw conclusions based on their observations, and at other times the stage directions elicit action by having students stand up or slap their forehead or any of a number of other actions that liven things up a bit. At the end of the dialogue, the instructor can summarize important points if that seems necessary, but the important points are also all contained within the dialogue, and the students have that to take home with them.

The procedure for constructing a dialogue is fairly simple. Decide on a topic and what points you want to make. Choose names for the characters. I always use only two characters for simplicity, and we usually call ours Bing and Bong. (We chose those names thinking they were without gender connotations, but we forgot Bing Crosby and the considerable number of Chinese men named Bing. Still, students of either gender seem not to mind being either Bing or Bong, whereas they are less accepting of names more commonly associated with either men or women.) Then sit down at your word processor, loosen up your imagination and start writing. You will be surprised how easily dialogues emerge once you begin.
 

• Avoid long speeches by either character. Usually 3-5 typed lines is about all the students will tolerate. The object is to keep each member of the pair actively engaged, so it is better to alternate between the characters fairly frequently. Likewise, in most instances I find that two pages is about the limit, although I have had a few successful 4 page dialogues. The novelty wears off if students have to read for too long.

• Use humor. In-jokes of your class or school are usually well received. Periodically I have either Bing or Bong say something about the teacher, which also works well. Insert an occasional action in the form of a stage direction to keep people alert. I often have them "jump up in excitement" or "glare in frustration" or other similar actions. It is often useful to put a noticeable action near the end of the dialogue so you will know when the class is nearly finished. Include props that allow them to make some observations while they talk.

• Finally, if you do one dialogue and it works well, you may be tempted to do many of them. They work best in moderation, however. I do only a few in a semester as part of a large repertoire of different approaches to presenting the material.

A variety of alternate approaches to the use of dialogues are possible. In an advanced cell biology class I created a dialogue about osmosis in which the students had to solve some problems about changes in cell volume at various times. They would discuss the principles for solving such problems, then one of the characters would pose a specific problem. The stage directions then told the other character to solve the problem.

Some high school teachers with which I have worked tell me that it's useful to have students in advanced classes write dialogues for the beginning classes to perform. (One of these teachers calls them "Biologues.") I have used dialogues with faculty also to think about issues in advising and even submitted a dialogue as a report of a study committee at Hope College. As with many other methods, the dialogue benefits from the creativity of the teachers who use them.

Are they effective? We have no systematic studies showing that students who use dialogues learn a particular set of material more readily than others. But our goal of involving more students in a large lecture class certainly has been met. People who sit quietly, sometimes even sullenly during other parts of the class can be seen actively conversing with Bing or Bong. There is always a ripple of appreciation whenever it becomes clear to the students that a dialogue is about to happen. And the benefit just in term of classroom atmosphere is very great. Sitting among 30 other pairs of students reciting a dialogue out loud in a classroom is an odd experience that always lightens up the class.

Acknowledgments

The teaching of Biology 111, Principles of Biology I, has been shared with three colleagues in the Department of Biology at Hope College, all of whom have put up with these dialogues and tried them out themselves: Christopher Barney, Christine Oswald and Paul Van Faasen. I am grateful for their suggestions as well as the interesting ideas for improvement I have received from students in Biology 111. I am also indebted to James Allis of the Hope College Department of Philosophy for interesting insights into the value and meaning of the dialogues of Plato.
 

Reference

Roberta M. Hall and Bernice R. Sandler. "The Campus Climate: A Chilly One for Women?" Project on the Status and Education of Women, Association of American Colleges, 1982. 22 pp.