The Circle: How to Foster Community in the Classroom

In 2019 the University of Toronto offered a graduate course on German Idealism, taught by Owen Ware. I had no background nor prior interest in the topic when I decided to take the course, and yet it was one of the best philosophy courses I have ever taken.

Part of what made this class special was that our conversations were structured by an exercise called The Circle. That’s what I want to share with you in this post. This exercise is not only useful for class discussions but other types of discussion, as well. In addition to philosophy courses it can be used to facilitate group discussion in committee meetings, or even as a conversational “game” of sorts among a group of friends.

Basic Mechanics of The Circle

The structure is pretty straightforward. Everyone sits in a circle and takes turns talking, starting with one person and going clockwise or counterclockwise. Each week a student is the Circle Opener, an assignment that resembles a standard student presentation. This person speaks for 5-10 minutes about one of the readings and proposes 1-2 topics for discussion. They ask open-ended questions that they find genuinely perplexing and need the group’s help to answer. They say a few words about why these questions interested them, and then they pass the discussion to the right or left.

For everyone else, the goal is to speak for three minutes or less on related insights or questions. The first couple of times we timed ourselves to learn how long the three minutes feel. Owen limited himself to this time limit as well, unless there was a critical confusion among the students that needed to be clarified. In my experience, the Circle seems to work best with groups of 3-10 people. However, it can be adapted to larger groups if each person limits themselves to one or two minutes.

Importantly, participation is optional. Everyone besides the Circle Opener is welcome to pass and not speak at all. This policy has several benefits. First, it makes each student’s contribution that much more generous, and there’s no pressure to fill space if you have nothing to say or if you’re having a bad day. This fostered an atmosphere of mutual cooperation and community in the classroom. One caveat to this policy was that participation did make up forty percent of the final grade in the course. So even though participation in Circle was never mandatory, there was a strong incentive nonetheless. But this is a good way to do it because it provides a positive rather than negative incentive for participating, which allows for creative thinking and a cooperative atmosphere. I discuss some of the other benefits of the Circle below.

Benefits of The Circle

For each of our turns speaking we were encouraged to brainstorm out loud. In this way, the Circle exercise provided a safe space for throwing out half-baked ideas, a skill that has proved useful in many other contexts. This was a refreshing change from debate-style discussion that most of us were used to. Students rarely receive explicit permission to say things without thinking them through first. And yet doing so can be incredibly rewarding. As a result, we focused less on defending pre-developed positions and more on developing a position together, creating a collaborative environment.

The Circle also makes it easier for quieter students to speak during class. In the normal format of a classroom, students must request permission to speak (either explicitly with a raised hand or implicitly by speaking up). Asserting oneself like this presumes that your comment is worthy of everyone’s time and attention. This can make it feel quite high-stakes to speak up in class. The Circle, by contrast, prompts every single student for their thoughts, with no conditions attached. This communicates to the student that their thoughts are worth listening to, no matter what. This had a huge impact on our classroom atmosphere, namely making it more inclusive. Personally, it helped me gain confidence in my ability to speak up in general. This is especially helpful for underrepresented folks, since offering a voice that sounds different (both literally and figuratively) from the rest of the class can be quite intimidating.  The Circle encourages students to speak up in even more ways than this.

In normal class formats, each comment warrants a response of some kind. For instance, if a student’s comment is met with total silence, or if the conversation proceeds as if they didn’t speak at all, this might imply that the comment was off-topic, nonsensical, or obvious (regardless of anyone’s intentions to imply this). Therefore, students become vulnerable to rejection by speaking up. But something about the Circle makes this effect disappear. Its conversational dynamics preclude expectations that each comment will build upon the last in this linear way. Therefore, the Circle makes it possible to speak up without risking rejection or pressuring others to respond.

Some Optional Elements and Their Benefits

In addition to this basic structure of the Circle, this course implemented several policies that supplement the Circle exercise nicely. One of these was that each week we were required to submit two questions we had from the reading, due twenty-four hours prior to the beginning of class. These were to be written in the style of our in-class contributions: open-ended and touching on the questions we personally found most vexing. This helped the Circle conversation flow much more easily because all of us had already started to think about the readings on our own. Personally, it also directed my reading in a nice way; I found that I was more attentive while reading when I was guided by a specific task like this. This assignment also facilitated a few moments of bonding when many of us had the same question or found the same passage to be particularly interesting. In addition to feeling connected to my peers when this happened, it also gave me confidence in my ability to pick out the interesting points of a dense reading on my own. On a more practical level it also discouraged procrastinating and gave us more opportunities to display our knowledge of the texts.

One of my favorite innovations was a policy that no one was allowed to mention texts or authors that were not on the syllabus during class discussions. Without this policy I doubt I would have been able to take a graduate class on German Idealism with my lack of background. For instance, one can imagine a class discussion that constantly references texts that only an insular few have read. By contrast, this policy ensured that the conversation was accessible to everyone. I cannot express how valuable this was to an outsider like myself. Note that this restriction only pertained to class discussions: it was perfectly fine to draw from external readings in correspondence with the professor and in our written assignments. In this way this policy lets us have our cake and eat it too. The classroom was a space for exploring the text in its own right, but it left plenty of interpretive work for our paper topics. This policy also encouraged passion for the topic: it was a joy to focus on the parts of the text that I personally found most interesting and relatable, rather than those parts that I happened to be able to explain due to my idiosyncratic literary background.

One might object that this policy could prevent the class from interpreting the text successfully. After all, the authors likely expected their readers to be familiar with some fundamental texts, even if most of these cannot be covered in a single class. But I would respond that our interpretations were not stunted by this policy because our goal was not to interpret the entire text successfully, only a small percentage. There was plenty of material that did not require an extensive corpus to discuss productively, and that’s what we focused on. However, in so far as this policy has drawbacks, it would be less of an issue in almost any other course. This policy would work especially well for contemporary topics since its authors tend to provide necessary context within their own papers. But even for historical topics I think the benefits outweigh the costs, and if it works for German Idealism I daresay it will work for almost any topic.

A few other policies helped to foster community within the classroom. On the first day of class we were told to refrain from introducing ourselves using the standard template of name, year in the program, and research interests. Instead we were each given two minutes to stand in front of the room and talk about something we love to do outside of academia. The idea behind this was to become acquainted through something that can bring us together, rather than what separates us from each other. This also led to a discussion afterward about the importance of staying in touch with those things we love outside of academia, since they can help foster work-life balance and maintain an identity outside of philosophy.

For those of us who are nervous public speakers, it was tempting to mentally rehearse our own speeches instead of listening to our fellow students. Owen acknowledged and empathized with this temptation. To help alleviate some of these nerves, he asked the rest of us to support each speaker through eye contact, smiling, asking questions, and clapping before and after their speech. Through this exercise, Owen taught us not only how to speak publicly but also how to listen deeply, a skill that he continued to foster throughout the course. As a result of this supportive environment some beautiful speeches were made, and this formed the beginning of a truly special sense of community among the students.

In order to further facilitate deep listening, Owen also banned technology from the classroom, including phones, tablets, and laptops. This meant that readings had to be printed and notes were to be taken with pen and paper only. As someone who refuses to keep paper around, I was skeptical to say the least. However, by the end of the first meeting I felt palpably more connected to the people in that room, and I think this policy helped facilitate that. I traded my beloved digital file system for a room of people that became my close friends and trusted intellectual collaborators, and I would do it again.

In addition to public speaking and deep listening, Owen also provided guidance on other skills for general philosophical work. As a new graduate student, I found this type of advice to be incredibly valuable. This included how to use critical feedback to improve our writing (which was essentially another lesson in deep listening) and strategies for reading texts that are especially opaque or nonlinear.

There were so many little things that went well in this class; I wish I had more space to do them justice. But I hope that this overview has provided some insight into a few concrete practices that can encourage lively discussion and community in the philosophy classroom. I would be more than happy to elaborate about any of these policies or the specifics of this course, so please do not hesitate to reach out over email.

Kristen Beard

Kristen Beard is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto. Her research lies at the intersection of philosophy of language and Peircean pragmatism. In addition to philosophy and teaching, she has a passion for issues surrounding mental health and disability.